“Maybe she just wants to look me in the eye while I’m dying,” Farweather said, with many pauses and great effort.
Oh, she doesn’t like you either?
I had gotten… really fond of Cheeirilaq.
Farweather bubbled faintly. “I want her job.”
Wanted, I thought, but didn’t say it.
The Defiance’s white coils folded away inside its hull when it was in normal space. That was something I’d only heard of on military ships. It allowed them greater close maneuverability, and protected the fragile coils in combat. So it could edge up right next to our tiny little disk with its tiny little Goodlaw and two damaged women on it. And it did.
I craned my head to look along the looming wall of the hull as it crept past. The lacquer effect wasn’t quite as flawless close up. There were pits and scratches, the marks of use. But I could see now, even in the dim light, that the whole ship was dark red, not black at all. Layers and layers of translucent dark red coating, until it built up to the point where it seemed black, and then the places where it had been smoothed thinner gleamed red.
Nice ship.
I wondered where the Admiral had stolen it.
A ring of red lights outlined what I took to be an airlock, as it drew up before us. The Defiance matched velocities with us so we all seemed to hang perfectly still. In respect to one another, we were—which is as still as anything gets, in this great universe.
The airlock irised open, and I found myself staring into a space too brightly lit to see clearly.
If we go in there, Cheeirilaq said, we are never coming out again.
“But it’s our choice, isn’t it? Die here, or—”
“I’ll make them… drag me,” Farweather gasped.
Oppositional defiant disorder, definitely.
“Right,” I said. It was a small item of refusal, but it was an item, and it was what I had. I wasn’t going in that ship. I wasn’t going to give myself up to them. Even if it was futile. They’d find a use for me, I was sure. And it was not a use that I would approve of.
Defiance, indeed. Be careful what you name a thing.
I kept thinking that even as my gravity headache intensified, and our disk began to float toward the open hatch. The Baomind’s song shrilled, sounding alarmed to my human awareness, and I felt the shiver in our disk even through the intervening body of my insectile friend. Consciousness was at the end of a graying tunnel, and I could see only the brightness of that hatch like the proverbial light at the end of it. It bathed my face, my body, in a golden glow.
I felt myself falling into it.
Gravity tractor, Cheeirilaq said, tightening its grip on me. I presume they are making good use of their space-time manipulation technology.
I fought it, and I could feel the disk fighting it too. But we were clawing up an increasingly steep slope. There were more of them than there were of us. Or they were better practiced. And it seemed like Farweather had faded out again, so no assistance from that direction. And while the Baomind was making curious and agitated music now and might decide to come to our assistance, in three hundred standard minutes or so—I didn’t have time for it to make up its mind.
I was dimly aware of the mirror disks moving, contracting into a smaller space. Clearing a… path?
Maybe they were planning something. I couldn’t wait to find out.
I extended my right hand, which still had the small projectile gun webbed to it. I wiggled my gloved finger inside the trigger guard.
I aimed the gun into the open hatchway and fired, and fired, and fired.
The gravslide pulling us into the Defiance failed as soon as I shot. Reactive force pushed us backward, augmented by our suddenly useful counterslide. We shot away from the big ship until I managed to get the reaction under control. Not really far.
But far enough that when something enormous smashed into it from the side—something that I had not seen coming, and sensed only as a gigantic influx of mass—we were not swept along with it. I cringed back against Cheeirilaq, who was still cradling me. Keeping me from floating free. The mantid cringed too, dropping its body between its many legs to lower its profile.
The Defiance had been spun aside by a tremendous impact. The biggest face I’d ever seen stared down at me again, reflecting pale peach in the rosy glow of the fading star. The corrugations between its starship-sized eyes gave it a surprised and slightly grumpy expression.
There were hundreds of Ativahikas behind it. Thousands maybe. The sky was as full of them as it was the disks of the Baomind.
I could not see where the Defiance had been flung. Perhaps it was still flinging. But Jothari and Freeport ships were winking into white space in every direction, and I could only assume they were skittering away as fast as their coils could carry them.
I wondered if the Ativahika would hunt them down.
It sounded disappointed when it said, Those who come to realms they cannot live in will always be vulnerable to those who are at home there.
Perhaps that ripple of its many filamentary appendages was the Ativahika equivalent of a shrug.
I looked left and right. Why didn’t you stop them before?
They preyed on the singular. At great distances. It took us time to… learn. The voice that wasn’t a voice and the words that were not words were hesitant, as if it were having difficulty expressing concepts that it took for granted as self-evident.
And is this the justice you promised us, little mind?
Under the circumstances… best I could do.
Its enormous eye regarded me, close enough to touch.
The best you could have done, under the circumstances.
I held my tongue. It didn’t seem like there would be much point to arguing.
I was ready to be knocked aside as easily as the Defiance. I hoped it would not harm Cheeirilaq.
My friend is not guilty of anything— I began
It was, the great voice that wasn’t a voice exactly said. Underneath it, the music of the Baomind agreed. It was the best you could have done.
Like a giant offering a fingertip to a mouse to sniff, it extended the long, narrow tip of its face toward me. Its snout? Some sensory organ? I didn’t know. It reminded me of the very tip of an elephant’s trunk, but forty times bigger and without breathing holes.
It stopped a decimeter away.
Say hello, Friend Haimey, Cheeirilaq murmured in my backchannel. It’s not polite to keep people waiting.
I somehow managed to hold up my hand. I remembered not to use the one the gun was webbed to.
I touched an Ativahika. I touched the Ancient One.
It touched me back. For a moment, I knew its name. But the name of an Ativahika is not something you can remember and recall later, because it’s at once too complex to hold in your mind all at once, and it’s ever-changing—so as soon as you know it, it’s gone.
But I knew it once. For an instant. And it was like knowing the location of every star in the endless sky.
What it said to me before it lifted away was, Here is your ship, little mind.
Then it drifted aside. And what I saw behind it was the Prize, flanked by I’ll Explain It To You Slowly and a dozen other Synarche Interceptors and Cutters; deep-space patrol boats that could hold their own in a fight or a rescue situation.