Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  You know, it hadn’t occurred to me before just that minute that Farweather’s EM pulse had not disrupted the parasite, that I could tell. I hadn’t even thought about it. I guess I really was integrating those senses.

  Neuroplasticity. It’s a hell of a thing.

  Finally we unwound ourselves and got a little space between us. Superstitiously, neither one of us crawled out of our packing material yet. And neither one of us stood up, either.

  Well, I say it was superstition. Maybe it was sense.

  We lay there, side by side. I was panting and aching. I was only paying enough attention to Farweather to make sure she didn’t intend to brain me with that wrench.

  The ship shuddered again, but the gravity remained intact this time. And now that I wasn’t distracted by being slammed against internal structures, I realized something.

  Through the Koregoi senso, I could tell that we were . . . slowing. Gradually. Not falling out of white space all at once as the bubble collapsed, but instead . . . unfolding. The Koregoi ship’s drive was gradually smoothing the space around us, doing something impossible—allowing us to change vector and apparent velocity while in white space.

  And through the Koregoi senso, I could also feel that there was another ship.

  Another ship, in white space. Coming up on us fast, then—incredibly—matching pace with us. Falling into formation, which was something that I had heard military vessels could do, but I had never actually witnessed happening. Even in all of Connla’s fancy flying, merging bubbles and coaxing abandoned vessels out of folded space-time, I’d never seen anything like this.

  Pirates.

  “We’ve got company,” Farweather said unhappily, because of course she could feel everything that I could.

  I looked at her in surprise. “Not yours?”

  “That wasn’t the plan,” she said. “But I’ve been out of contact. Maybe the plan has changed.”

  “Maybe they were following, and when the ship started acting weird they moved in?”

  She gave me a sly look. If she gathered that it was a test, and I was fishing for knowledge of the Freeporters’ technological abilities, she didn’t let on.

  She just shrugged. “I guess we’re going to find out.”

  CHAPTER 23

  THE LIGHTS DIMMED ONCE MORE, and the whole giant ship shuddered. I regretted unrolling ourselves from the padding, but the gravity stayed on and we didn’t suffer any sudden, unexpected vector changes that left us ricocheting off the walls.

  I unlocked Farweather’s chain, and she gazed at me speculatively, rubbing her wrist. “If I’d known that all it would take was kissing you, I would have done that ages ago.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m going up to observation. This is your chance to come along.”

  Also, if something terrible happened to the ship and I was incapacitated, I needed to know she had a fighting chance to survive, and I hadn’t left her welded to a bulkhead wall to starve.

  “Observation, huh?”

  “Shake a leg,” I said. “It’s pretty.”

  We made it up slowly, limping and leaning on walls. She kept an elbow pressed to her side hard enough that I thought about offering to wrap her ribs for her, but she didn’t ask and if she didn’t ask I wasn’t going to offer. I was braced for her to try something, but she didn’t. Possibly she was counting me as a potential ally if it turned out that we had enemies in common.

  In any case, I wasn’t going to turn my back on her. So I made her go first, and she didn’t complain. I was carrying her bolt prod, anyway—I’d retrieved it from my hiding spot before I turned her loose—so it probably would have been a bad idea for her to come after me unless she could get the drop somehow.

  We proceeded to observation. It was pretty. We were still in white space, and the twisting bands of light were particularly lovely for being so narrow, with so much dark between.

  Gorgeous to look at, but it gave me a chill. We were way out in the Dark and the Empty, if this was all the starlight around.

  Starlight. What a tautology. As if there’s anything else in the universe that makes light. Directly or indirectly, all the light there is originates from stars.

  Well, I suppose you could make a case for antimatter, or for burning hydrogen, but you’d have to stretch the point, and besides, fussing with poetry until you ruin it has never been a sport that appealed to me.

  Farweather walked toward the dome, still rubbing her wrist where the shackle had been. She didn’t seem to have any galls or sores—I’d been careful to pad the thing, and to give her supplies to change the padding regularly—so I guessed it was just the reflexive fussing motion of someone recently freed.

  “Wow,” she said.

  I grinned into my palm. “Told you it was pretty.”

  She shot me a look over her shoulder that was practically scorching. My cheeks burned; I glanced away.

  Terrible idea.

  And it wasn’t getting any better.

  Flustered, I grabbed ahold of the conversation and unsubtly steered it. “Should you take us out of white space?”

  “Maybe. I don’t have fine maneuvering control.”

  “How were you going to dock us on the other end?” I blurted, scandalized.

  “Tugboats.” She shook her head at me. “You ought to know about those.”

  I ought to. Well, that answered one of my questions.

  She pointed. “There’s our company.”

  I followed the line of her finger to see what she was aiming it at, and discovered a ship sharing our white bubble that was doing absolutely nothing to render itself unnoticeable. It burned running lights, and had floodlit itself so I could make out the registration marks and the details of the design.

  I caught my breath when I saw it, my mouth relaxing into a smile. What I was looking at, blinking in disbelief, was a pretty standard Synarche interdiction cruiser, a light Interceptor-class constabulary vessel that was mostly engines and ship-to-ship weapons held together with an armored skin around a small crew compartment, its needle-like hull wrapped in a double set of white coils.

  Well, that explained how it had caught us. Those things were fast.

  It was inside the Prize’s enormous white coils, a piece of fancy flying that made me think painfully of my lost shipmate. I’d heard rumors of Judiciary pilots who could match up white bubbles in transit, while both ships were pushing v. I’d never thought to have a front-row glimpse of it.

  “Not one of ours,” Farweather said.

  “Not one of yours, maybe.”

  She shot me a look that was far more amused than angry. Pirate fatalism, maybe. “You think they’ll be pleased to see you?”

  I managed to keep my nails from rattling on the butt of the bolt prod. Whatever I might have said back to her, I never got the chance to try, because a male voice broke in. Steeped in dry humor, moderately familiar, it said, “Oh, I should think they will be very pleased to see you, Dz.”

  Singer?

  “Singer?”

  Silence, for a moment. Then: “Sorry, adjusting the speaker protocols. Is this voice a closer match?”

  “Oh my goodness, Singer!”

  “Present,” the shipmind said, from all around me. “Wow, there’s a lot of room in this brain.”

  I would have hugged him. I needed to hug him, but I couldn’t hug him, so instead I bounced in place on my toes and swung my arms like an overexcited five-an-old who has to let some of the energy out somehow or explode all over the place, emotionally speaking, and messily.

  “How are you alive?” I babbled. “I just—how are you on the Koregoi ship?”

  “I ditched here,” he said. “When the tug was destroyed, I sent a personality seed over. Remember that I had an uplink going? It just took me nearly this long to figure out the system over here, rewrite my own code so that I could run on it effectively, then write the ship itself a new OS so I could control my lips and fingers, to use a totally inappropriate anthropomorphization. Also, I
had the Koregoi senso in your brain to use as a transitional platform, until somebody fried your fox.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You used my brain as . . . an adaptor?”

  “To bridge incompatible systems.”

  “An adaptor.”

  “. . . Yes?”

  I reached out and patted the nearest bulkhead, just about swimming in relief. “This is amazing. This is the best news ever. Wait, did you . . . ? Were you in my senso? While my fox was still operating?

  “I had a seed in you, too, though just a tiny one with very limited functionality; there’s not a lot of room in there.”

  “I heard you—it?—talking to me. Maybe? Why didn’t you tell me you were alive?”

  Farweather had turned around and was staring at me, up at space, at the Interceptor, around at the deck and walls of the Koregoi ship. I glared at her. Whatever she was about to say, I did not want to hear it.

  She shut her mouth again and turned her shoulder to me. That was fine. The feeling was pretty mutual.

  “I wasn’t in contact with that seed,” Singer said. “If anything happened to corrupt this instance of me, I wanted the uncorrupted backup. And as for why it didn’t tell you—it wasn’t a proper AI. Just a personality seed.”

  “You could have let me know you were there!”

  “Knowing myself, I’m sure I was talking to you.”

  “. . . I might have noticed that,” I agreed.

  I didn’t know enough about programming artificial intelligences to have a good sense of the technical difference between an AI proper and a personality seed. But I could probably make do with my self-evident sense of the generalities, and I was figuring that out pretty rapidly.

  “But how’d you get in here?” I said.

  “I’d transferred an archive over to this machine as well, as soon as I got access to it. Did you know there’s a lot of bandwidth in your parasite?”

  “You propagated? Singer, you did something illegal?”

  He sighed, which was something he did for communication with meatpeople, not because shipminds exhale loudly in worry or frustration. “It seemed like a safe precaution. And I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  Farweather sneered at me, and (I thought) at Singer and the Synarche and the whole lot of us in general. “And it’s just coincidence that he shows up now.”

  I thought of the voice in my head, the one I’d thought was my own wishful thinking. I thought of the power fluctuations and the weird way in which the ship had occasionally seemed to help me out: the stanchion, for example. Or maybe it was just that the ship was helpful, even without Singer in charge, but still, I was convinced. He hadn’t just shown up now. He’d been around the whole time. He’d just . . . manifested now. And I couldn’t blame him for biding his time until the reinforcements got here. Or had it taken him this long to get adequate control of the Prize’s systems? Was it possible that he had summoned them in once he was active? No, he couldn’t have reached across two white bubbles. . . .

  But possibly he could have sensed them approaching, and slowed the Prize to help them catch us. Who knew what kind of sensors this thing had, and how it could interact with dark gravity.

  Farweather said, “I’m sure this sudden AI has nothing to do with the Synarche ship matching pace with us. You’re being played, Haimey. This is not your friend. It’s just a . . . simulation.”

  She tried to sound concerned, but I knew how the Freeporters—and Farweather herself—felt about free artificial intelligences. They deemed them untrustworthy and kept what limited computation they used hobbled, not allowing it to develop self-awareness.

  Paranoid Luddites.

  I glanced up at the interdiction cruiser and its impossibly skilled flying. A bubble of optimism rose in me—one that I would have quenched, if I’d been able to tune, because the pain of its being disappointed would be so extreme. But I was filled with what the ancient poets would have called a wild surmise, a hope so strong it hurt me physically.

  “What about Connla and the cats?” I said to Singer, ignoring Farweather. My voice broke.

  He ignored the evidence of emotion. “I’m not completely sure. But they might have lived. They were all suited up, and the part of the tug that was directly hit was the drive, not the control cabin.”

  Relief surged in me. Dizzying, rendering me so giddy I actually reached for my fox to bump it back under control. I shouldn’t have bothered, and not just because I had no fox—because the elation was replaced with dread as I had another idea. A terrible one. What happened once could happen again, and while the Interceptor was a hell of a lot tougher than a tug . . .

  “Wait. Singer. Do you have control of this ship’s weapons?”

  “This ship does not have any weapons,” he reported.

  I frowned. I looked at Farweather. It occurred to me that she was, in fact, under my skin. That my own Stockholmification was proceeding apace.

  And that I had been letting some critical pieces of knowledge slide, because it was easier not to think about them when it was just her and me, and we needed each other for sanity and survival.

  “That’s right, Zanya,” I said. “Didn’t you have some theory about what happened to the tug?”

  “. . . About that.”

  I turned on her. I didn’t say anything, but my hand was on the butt of her shock prod. I hated her, at that moment, more than I knew I could hate a human being. My hope had made me vulnerable, and the need to defend that vulnerability was making me angry now.

  She froze.

  I said, “Whatever you’re about to say, you might as well say it. But don’t lie to me again.”

  “We didn’t think it would be manned,” she said. “We assumed the whole crew would be over on the Prize.”

  “Why off Earth . . .” But I knew. Assuming she was telling the truth—and why would she?—I knew. Of course, that’s how the pirates would have done it—each one determined to defend their stake in the prize vessel because nobody else would do it for them. And we hadn’t gotten a proximity warning before the destruction commenced. So the only explanation was that they’d used the particle burst caught up in their bow wave to take out the tug.

  Those reckless assholes.

  It was only the sheerest luck that they hadn’t taken out the Koregoi ship and me in addition to the tug. Well, luck. And probably Zanya’s advanced relationship with her symbiote. And some fancy flying, though it pained me to admit it.

  At least Zanya hadn’t been the pilot. . . . So I had two casual mass murderers to contend with.

  I turned my back on Zanya. It was absolutely a stupid thing to do, and I did it anyway because if I didn’t I was going to electrocute her with her own weapon.

  Singer would watch my back, anyway.

  “Singer, what’s that ship out there?” I asked, moving away from Farweather. She didn’t follow; I heard her steps as she withdrew toward the windows at the rim of the observation deck.

  I went toward the other side.

  “It’s an Interceptor-class interdiction cruiser,” he said helpfully.

  “Tell me something I don’t already know.” I leaned my forehands on the transparent material of the viewport.

  “This particular vessel is the Synarche Justice Vessel I’ll Explain It To You Slowly. I’m afraid I do not have access to its current crew or mission assignments. My database accesses are a little limited right now.”

  “You have databases at all?”

  “The Koregoi ship has a great deal of fossil information aboard, and I’ve had some success in beginning to decrypt it. A lot of it is star charts and translation protocols, as you might expect. None of it is current. But I’ve managed to determine from the drift in the star charts since they were last accessed that the ship was in mothballs for approximately thirty thousand ans.”

  He said it so casually. And it fell like a stone.

  I gaped. I turned around and looked at Farweather, because I needed to share my incredulity with somebody, ev
en if it was somebody I hated.

  She looked back at me mildly.

  “But everything works.”

  “So it does,” he said.

  “My species wasn’t even really a species yet.”

  “Technically speaking, untrue,” he said. “By a factor of ten, more or less. But I understand the spirit in which you speak.”

  “Holy crap,” I said. “You found the Rosetta Stone.”

  “Technically speaking,” he repeated, “I am the Rosetta Stone.”

  This was so much more than I had been expecting.

  Lowering my voice, I said, “Singer, can you reboot my fox from there?”

  Resonances changed as he localized his voice to me. “I need to generate a wireless signal and run a diagnostic. That will take a moment. The I’ll Explain It To You Slowly is hailing us, however. Shall I answer?”

  “Please do.” A Synarche ship, hanging abeam us, out here in the middle of nowhere. A Synarche ship.

  Hope.

  Home.

  Maybe I wouldn’t be dying forgotten in a pirate outpost somewhere on the edge of the Great Big Empty after all.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “I’ve accessed your fox,” Singer said, moments later. “I can’t be entirely sure if there’s physical damage, because I can’t run a diagnostic until it’s operating, but I should have the option of rebooting it. And don’t worry; I’m talking with the Synarche craft right now. We’ll be dropping into normal space momentarily.”

  “Are they coming over?”

  “They want you to bring the prisoner to them.”

  I lowered my voice to a bare whisper. “She’ll put up a fight. She doesn’t want to die out here. She’s a sophipath. All about her own needs. Also, she’s at risk of exploding, if what she told me can be believed.”

  “What?”

  “She’s a human bomb,” I told him, and explained briefly. “Unless she was lying to me.”

  “Or the other Freeporters were lying to her.” He paused long enough that I imagined he was communicating with the Interceptor.

  I said, “Have you made them aware that the prisoner might blow up?”