I tapped it with my heel.
“You will take our knowledge and harvest them yourselves.”
Cheeirilaq twitched again. This time I didn’t argue.
“If you talk to us, there can be peace. Negotiation. Trade. You could come out of hiding. We could find your people a world to settle on. A world of your own.”
“So you could own us. So we would have a vulnerable heart once more, just begging to be destroyed.”
“No—”
“So you could own us. That is not reparations. Synarche, we are not interested in your lies.”
The com connection died. I pushed my hand against my helmet because I couldn’t reach my aching forehead. It was the hand with the gun webbed to it, so I used the back.
“Bugger,” I said.
It took me a moment to identify the terrible bubbling sound coming over my com as Farweather laughing at me between swallows of blood. I resisted the urge to smash her fucking helmet in, but only barely.
“Guess… they don’t want… charity.”
“You shut up,” I said. It was our fault. It was our fault, or at least some of it was, and I wanted to fix it. But the immediate situation was her fault, as much as it was anyone’s. And I wanted somebody to blame.
I looked around. The Jothari vessels remained in position, interspersed with Freeport ships. The thing was, I was pretty sure we did owe them reparations. But getting the Synarche to agree might be easier than getting the Jothari to believe.
They had committed crimes; it was true. But they were driven to those crimes by our own crime of having destroyed them, even if it was indirectly. And accidentally.
It was a morally complex equation. But I knew in my bones that some kind of reconciliation was the right choice to pursue. Horrible crimes were committed by them, and by us—against each other and against unrelated others.
I hadn’t quite been emotionally prepared for them to just utterly spurn my offer.
Although.
I hadn’t accepted it when Farweather—representing Niyara’s people, after all—had wanted me back in her fold. But that was because she was untrustworthy, and just wanted to use me. Use me more.
The Synarche wouldn’t use the Jothari again, would they? We had learned some things in the intervening centuries. Some things about being a pluralistic society without bringing colonial force to bear.
Hadn’t we?
…If we had, I had to let the Jothari walk away. And determine their own direction.
I didn’t have to let them have possession of the Baomind, though. And I didn’t have to let them hand it over to—or even share it with—the Freeporters. Who were assholes.
Especially since the Baomind had asked us—or Singer, at least—for help.
The problem was, my resources currently included one representative of Justice, one half-dead pirate who wasn’t on my side anyway, and one engineer who was in a race between suffocation and bleeding to death. I was steadfastly refusing to look at my ox meter. Let it be a surprise.
Come on. Come on. Think of something. Come on.
I leaned my helmet against Cheeirilaq’s film-suited carapace. “I might be out of ideas, Friend Cheeirilaq.”
I am sorry, Friend Haimey. I also… may be out of ideas.
Exhaustion clawed me as I watched the enemy ships arrange themselves to clear their firing lines. I bumped my adrenals once more, wishing I believed I’d be around to pay the miserable price for it. The pirates didn’t need me for Niyara’s code anymore.
The friendly mirror disks of the Baomind swarmed around us, filling me with their encouraging song, a fragile, glittering shield. I felt a terrible sadness for them. How many of their neurons had been destroyed? Worse, did they have individual identities? How much damage had we and the pirates and Jothari already done to them? Not much, I hoped. Surely what had been destroyed was a negligible fraction of the incomprehensibly large number of disks still maintaining their sphere around the dying star.
Once we were gone, would the Freeporters resort to threats or force to control the Baomind? Would that even work? Or would they just refuse to rescue it, unless it agreed to be enslaved? They despised artificial intelligences, but surely they were capable of seeing that this was a resource too valuable to just destroy, even if they were incapable of seeing it as a person. Of regarding it as an intelligence worthy of protection and partnership.
I was wondering why they were bothering with the display of force when all they had to do was leave us here. I was wondering if, if they fired, I could wrap us all in a protective fold of space-time. I was wondering if it wouldn’t be better to just die under their barrage rather than putting it off the few minutes we had left. I was wondering, frankly, what kind of a pointless gesture I could make just so I wouldn’t feel like I was just dying passively. I had the handgun: no use at all against anything more armored than a human being in a space suit.
Thinking that made me realize Connla would be amused by how his culture’s memes had infected me, if he ever got the chance to know—
One of the pirate vessels began to ease toward us.
I reached across Cheeirilaq’s thorax and nudged Farweather. When she didn’t move, I balled up my cold, numb fingers and punched her in the arm. It probably hurt me at least as much as it did her. “Commander!”
Blood spattered the inside of her visor. She must have been coughing it up.
I sympathized.
“Can’t you let me die in peace?” Her eyes focused on me with an obvious effort. “Oh, it’s you. No, of course you can’t.”
“Zanya, what’s that ship?”
I pointed with my helmet in the time-honored fashion of spacers everywhere.
It wasn’t hers—the white one that had shot our boom off way back at the beginning of things. This one was a glossy black, a color with depth and reflections, fading to a burnished dried-blood highlight on its raised features. It reminded me of the prized urushi lacquer from the homeworld, an ancient art that still piqued interest throughout the worlds.
Connla and I had salvaged a ship whose cargo contained three urushi pieces once—two antique pens and a longsword. That trip had taken out a sizable portion of our obligation.
Farweather’s labored breaths were clear over the com as she struggled to follow. “Oh buttercakes,” she said, which would have made me laugh my arse off if I weren’t in insupportable pain just breathing.
“That’s the Defiance,” she said. “That’s the Admiral.”
“There’s no such thing as the Admiral,” I said. “She’s a scary story.”
She laughed, one choked gasp. It sounded like it hurt. “Well, I guess you’d know.”
It looked like a pirate admiral’s ship, if anything did. And it was… coming to pick us up. Shouldering gently through the swarms of mirror disks, edging toward us. I wondered why they didn’t just send a launch. I wondered why they were coming to get us at all. What loyalty did they have to Farweather, who they’d been willing to remote-detonate if it came down to it?
“I don’t understand your people,” I told her. My own voice was getting a bit halting now. My head throbbed with that wall of pressure, like something coming in, but whatever it was couldn’t be bothered to make its presence known.
Maybe it was an artifact of my being in the process of bleeding to death.
I was still looking at her, so I saw her smile curve behind the blood. “We haven’t got the least idea what makes you people function, either.”
The Defiance was nearly on us, and still there was no sign of a launch, and no sign of an opening airlock hatch. It was just coming, easing up on us, matching relative velocities so that, in the vastness of intergalactic space, we seemed to be standing still.