Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  I could have run my plan sooner. It was ready; I was ready. But there was nothing to be gained by hurrying. And in all honesty, I was stalling a little because I was scared.

  Scared of Farweather. Scared of whether or not my gravity trick was going to work if there was another living body in the way of it, or whether Farweather would have better control—or whether the ship itself would intervene with some kind of failsafe to protect her. And I was scared as well of what I might do if my plan worked and I actually did get the upper hand.

  I was not, shall we say, that much farther along the road of releasing my attachment to wanting to slam her head into a bulkhead over and over and over again than I had been a standard decian or so previous. I didn’t think my self-control could be trusted, and so I didn’t want to test it.

  On the other hand, we would be getting close to Freeport space, inasmuch as they were a they and capable of claiming and holding territory (all things are impermanent). The closer we were to Farweather’s allies, the more trouble I was in. I guessed she probably had some kind of escort close somewhere—the ship she had jumped from to flying-tackle the Prize, for example—and would her erstwhile allies just trust her to take off with something as utterly unique as an intact Koregoi vessel as its sole prize crew without some kind of supervision?

  Furthermore, I could smell her roasting coffee in there occasionally, and after twenty diar of space nori three meals a dia, I probably would have launched a commando raid just for a pound of beans, even if I had to chew them and swallow my spit to get any good out of them. So there was honestly no chance of me waiting too long.

  The mutineers on the Bounty had their strawberries. You know, people say all the time that they would kill somebody for a cup of coffee. It was literally starting to seem like a pretty good idea to me.

  Well, not kill. I wasn’t going to murder anyone if I could possibly help it. I was willing to keep telling myself that until I convinced myself, too.

  Not for coffee. Not for Singer. Not for Connla. Not for Bushyasta and Mephistopheles, and honestly I was maddest about the cats. They hadn’t had any choices or any options.

  I told myself again that I wasn’t here to kill anybody todia.

  Not if I could help it.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I was pulling on my boots—which I was finally used to—to go make it happen when the imp that installs perverse hardware and his sister, the imp of perverse coincidence, intervened. But let me go back a little, and tell it all in some sort of order.

  I didn’t have the boots on already because I was moving through the maintenance access tubes—what I assumed, anyway, were maintenance access tubes, because I had no idea what the heck else they might be for. And as a human engineer playing archaeologist in a vast alien starship, I figured I was entitled to a little intellectual laziness.

  I’d had—reluctantly—to bump twice to keep my anxiety levels manageable while I made my way through the tubes. It wasn’t their narrowness—I would have had to have any claustrophobia rightminded out a long time ago to keep being a tugboat engineer—it was the fact that I was trying to move through them in utter physical silence, floating along and directing myself with tiny touches. While also keeping my sensorium pulled in tight against my skin, not interacting with the ship at all, and hoping that in so doing I could hide my movements from Farweather, if she happened to be looking for me.

  She had some kind of a trick that concealed her whereabouts pretty well, except when it didn’t. I just hoped I was reasonably approximating the manner in which she accomplished it. It turns out that sneaking is physically and emotionally exhausting, which maybe was why she didn’t do it all the time either.

  Who would have guessed she might have human frailties and failings?

  I’d mapped all of the parts that were outside of what I thought of as Farweather’s territory, and I both had them foxed in, and had developed the kind of intimate muscle memory that takes practice and exploration. When I drifted onto Farweather’s turf, though, it was like moving from a well-lit space to a dim and smoke-filled one. I had my theories and extrapolations to navigate by, and I had as far down the tubes as I could see with my own unaugmented eyes. I projected a skin of my theorized map onto the walls of the tubes as I spidered along, imagining myself some kind of formless sea creature wafting through pipes and down drains.

  I always was a little too creative for my own good.

  The anxiety was bad. The sense of all the ways things could go wrong loomed intensely over me, congealed into a breathless knot behind my sternum. And I kept coming up with new ones. I could mess up the gravity and get squished. I could get sealed in and spend the rest of my objectively quite short but subjectively probably very long and unhappy existence like a jellyfish in the tubes, drifting along, unable to get out. And both of those seemed preferable in my head to the idea that I was going to have to climb out of this accessway and go get into a physical confrontation with somebody who was armed and didn’t mind conflict in the slightest.

  Clades . . . are not big on training people how to maintain boundaries and manage necessary conflict. We all just get along. No matter what. Whether it suits our personal needs or not. Personal needs are a privileged affectation.

  I didn’t really have an option of getting along with the pirate. Not unless I wanted to wind up trapped in some Freeport outpost fixing stolen ships as an indentured servant or something similar.

  Turn it off.

  Dammit, I tried!

  I had tuned the anxiety out, but the fear of the situation was enough that it kept breaking through. Deep, visceral programming: avoid the fight. It was paralyzing.

  Don’t choke, I told myself, and then rolled my eyes at myself. I had probably just ensured that I would be choking.

  After three minutes clinging to a coil of piping, forcing my limbic system to stop hyperventilating through blunt and hard-core endocrine control, I thought of Connla’s flying trick of bumping his sophipathology up enough so you didn’t worry too much about consequences.

  It seemed like a terrible idea.

  After two more minutes, I decided I needed to try it, or Farweather was going to figure out where I was, poke a bolt prod in through a convenient access hatch, and electrocute me in my burrow like a particularly large and smelly ship rat.

  I bumped, got a little magnetism in there to turn off the inconvenient brain bits for an hour or so, and set a timer lockout so I couldn’t do it again until after the first dose had worn off. That last part is pretty essential if you’re doing this sort of thing alone, because once you turn off your common sense and ability to assess consequences, it turns out almost nobody wants them back again.

  After that, everything was easy and I couldn’t figure out what I’d been so apprehensive about. I felt confident, loose. I knew what I was doing, and I wasn’t going to have any problem handling one little pirate. This was my domain—space was my domain—and if nothing else I could just get the Prize to shut down gravity entirely and be six times as capable in free fall as she was.

  Hell, Farweather didn’t even have afthands. Whereas I could anchor myself, eat spaghetti, turn a screwdriver, and pick my nose simultaneously. And without even getting the spaghetti anyplace biologically inappropriate.

  It took me only a little bit of exploratory back-and-forth to check the location of the access hatches. I’d gotten pretty expert at identifying their nubby bits and the pressure points that made them smoke up and vanish when you wanted to go through. Confident I’d gotten as close to her command center as I was likely to, I located an access hatch I could use to get out into the corridors. I unslung my boots from over my shoulder and started working them on my afthands, as previously mentioned. Once I had them seated, I’d reach out into the Koregoi senso, try to feel where Farweather was before she noticed me (assuming she hadn’t spotted me already and also assuming she wasn’t lying in wait) so I could pop out, slam the gravity down around her, and give her the thumping she so rich
ly deserved.

  That was when I heard the screaming.

  Reflexively—and when had using the alien technology that had infected my body without my consent become reflexive?—I reached out into the Koregoi senso. It unfolded like releasing cramped wings, and I felt instantly less anxious—as if my inner ear had been affected, or my hands bound behind my back, and I’d been trying to walk a balance beam. The relief was profound.

  So profound it almost made up for the screaming.

  Actually, the noise didn’t bother me at all, except as noise. It was really irritating, like a crèche full of three-an-olds not getting their own way.

  If I just shot her, the noise would probably stop, wouldn’t it?

  What a pity you don’t have a gun.

  Oh yeah. That is a problem.

  Calm down, Dz. There’s only two people on this boat that could be screaming, and you’re pretty sure this one isn’t you.

  It could be a decoy.

  Of course it could. Or she could be in trouble, in which case—

  In which case, I really don’t have to do anything about it, do I?

  Yes, Haimey. You probably do. You still need her expertise.

  A heavy sigh escaped me, the only external signifier of my interior argument. Briefly, I closed my eyes. There was still screaming, but it sounded tonally different—less surprised, and more furious and pained. I’d guessed right—the noise was close, and it was echoing through the maintenance tube as loudly if somebody had set up a speaker in here to boost it.

  At least if she’s hurt, she’ll be easier to contain.

  Assuming she’s not in need of massive medical attention I can’t provide.

  Well, either way, she’s not getting any less injured while we wait.

  That’ll just make her easier to control.

  Dz.

  Over the top, I said to myself, and triggered the access hatch.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Well, I didn’t think she was faking it.

  Farweather lay curled on her side in a puddle of very bright red blood, clutching her right wrist with her left hand. She was mid-shout when I weaseled out of the access door, found my orientation in local gravity, and dropped lightly down.

  I landed in a crouch. Farweather stopped screaming and peeled her blood-slimed fingers loose from her wrist to snatch at her weapon. Red spurted, and she gave up trying to get the gun and went back to applying pressure again.

  My weapon didn’t require me to reach for anything except the (metaphorically speaking) goodwill of the ship. I felt it, felt it acquiesce to my desire, felt it tighten down on the already fallen pirate with the force of several Earth gravities—no joke even for somebody raised down a well. For a spacer like me, it would have been profoundly incapacitating. With a squeezed, breathy moan, she collapsed onto her back, just about managing to keep pressure on her wrist as both hands were pinned to her chest by their own weight.

  “Rot in hell,” she groaned, glaring at me.

  I stood a meter off, observing Farweather and the apparatus surrounding her. It looked like a spring had recoiled, sending a piece of metal across her lower arm with enough force that it had acted like a blade. She had an arterial bleed going on, though not too bad a one—as if there were anything such as an insignificant arterial injury—and she was managing to keep enough pressure on it that while she could probably bleed out pretty easily if left untreated, she wasn’t in immediate danger of dying.

  I guess she had sensed me coming, after all. If she hadn’t tried to get tricky, and had just gotten the drop on me the old-fashioned way by electrocuting me with her bolt prod or putting a few holes in me with the airgun she had holstered on her thigh, I’d be dead or a captive by now. But she’d tried to set a trap. And apparently I had been right about being the better engineer.

  What kind of a sophipath wore a projectile weapon in a pressure vessel?

  Well, a pirate who would think nothing of murdering a whole crew of people, even if those people were monsters. Silly question. Moving on now.

  I probably really should kill her. I’d be saving my own life, and a lot of other lives over the long term, if I did.

  I probably really should. But for now, I managed to swallow down another bolus of rage, and remember that I needed her. I groped in my suit repair kit for a roll of pressure tape. Crouching down, I braced and counterbalanced myself, and reached cautiously into the high-gravity zone to lay the tape very gently on her sternum.

  If she was a cat, she would have been spitting at me with flattened ears.

  “Go ahead and tape up that wrist,” I said.

  She did, using one hand and her teeth, managing not to lose too much more blood in the process. It took her about ninety seconds, and by the time she was done more fresh blood was smeared all over her, the deck, her face, and everything else within range—including splatters on my boots. The roll of tape was absolutely thick with gore. One more small, irreplaceable, useful item off the inventory.

  I really wished I had access to a printer. You never realize how spoiled you get by not having to keep stuff around because you can just make it when you need it, until suddenly you discover that stuff is a finite resource and you can’t just automatically get more.

  When she’d stopped her bleeding, the next thing she did was reach for her gun.

  I was, of course, ready for that, and pinned her to the deck hard enough that her face pulled back against the bones and her breathing grew labored.

  “Bad pirate,” I said. I was gambling that if she wasn’t actively bleeding, her Koregoi parasite could repair her the same way mine had repaired me. Otherwise, well, there wasn’t much I could do for her that wouldn’t result in gangrene.

  “. . . enjoying this.”

  Yeah, I was. I wish I could say I wasn’t proud of it—I knew I wouldn’t be proud of it when I quit being a temporary psychopath—but it wasn’t so easy to stop enjoying it, either.

  “Leave your weapons in the holsters, unclip them, and give them to me,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” she answered.

  “I’ll crush you,” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” she answered. Her breathing strained under the weight of her own flesh. Still she managed a pained smile.

  I let the ship pull her down a little more. She moaned. My fingernails dug into my forepalms.

  She should be squashed like the insect she was. She should be paying for all the lives she had ended. Everything awful she had chosen and done. I wanted to smear her all over the decking and walk away.

  She turned her head so her cheek lay flat against the deck, still looking at me. Her neck muscles weren’t going to enjoy that tomorrow, if we both lived so long. I wondered if the pressure was blurring her vision yet.

  “More weight,” she said.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  It wasn’t really a standoff, of course. I was healthy—healthy-ish—and she’d lost a lot of blood. I just reached in again, bracing myself even more carefully, and relieved her of her visible armaments.

  First I had to spend ten minutes talking myself out of murdering her in cold blood. And by the time I’d actually worked up my moral fiber enough that I could touch her without assassinating her, she’d passed out due to acceleration sickness, and I could pat her down for other dangerous items (two knives, a monofilament garrote that she was lucky she hadn’t incorporated into her death trap or she’d probably be missing that hand entirely, and a spare clip for the air pistol) and make sure that her wrists and ankles were taped together securely with the blood-fouled suit repair kit.

  By then, I was feeling more like myself again, which seemed like a great loss, because I didn’t even get the chance to kick her in the head a couple of times while I was still disinhibited enough to do it.

  I even made a point of being careful to make sure she was getting adequate blood flow to her extremities, which was definitely more than she deserved, and I found her first aid kit (she wasn’t getting anything else out of
mine) and gave her a spray-hypo of a broad-spectrum antibiotic and antiviral to keep her from getting alien space gangrene or the deadly Koregoi herpes or whatever else might be floating around out here.

  The odds of cross-species infection were slim. But if I made the conscious decision to invest in some kind of caretaking behavior where she was concerned, I figured I was psychologically less likely to shove her out the nearest airlock.

  Sunk cost fallacy. Make it work for you.

  Why that seemed important to me at the time, I’m not really sure. Something about maintaining my humaneness and self-respect in the face of adversity. Or doing things the hard way. Or some side effect of my social conscience reasserting itself after its nice little nap.

  Farweather didn’t see it that way. She woke up while I was going through her kit, and though she didn’t say anything, she lay quietly and watched me give her the antibiotic and antiviral hypo. I tucked her in with a couple of reflective blankets and gave her some fluids and glucose from her own first aid setup to ward off shock, which I guess baseline humans are more vulnerable to than I am.

  “That’s not going to make me think better of you,” she said mildly, when I’d backed away.

  I shrugged. “What you think of me is immaterial.”

  “So you don’t need anything from me?”

  She said it in a flirting tone that might have been more effective if she weren’t covered in her own blood from trying to kill me. Oh, and if I hadn’t had all that nonsense turned off. And I was very glad I had, because Farweather—mass murderer or no—was just the sort of bad girl I knew could get under my skin if I let her.

  Clade upbringings fuck you up on so many levels, when you finally let the oppressive rightminding go and try to exist as an independent human being with things like judgment and will.

  “Sure,” I said dryly. I rummaged through her supplies and found the coffee. There was a little probe for heating water, and a vacuum extractor to draw it through the beans.