‘If that bastard did something to you, I’m going to—’
Mieli. The hunter thing. It’s coming.
The spimescape goes crazy. Vectors rain upon Perhonen like the scrawls of an angry child. Mieli starts to summon combat autism, but the ship’s systems are sluggish after the Box god infection. And it is already too late.
The hunters surround the ship like a shoal of fish, thousands and thousands of them, a river of tiny stars flowing through and past the ship. Their upload beams crisscross the central cabin in a deadly spiderweb, but just brushing lightly, not burning this time. They ignore Perhonen and converge towards the router like a giant arrowhead.
The router vanishes in a blaze of antimatter, piranhas tearing a wedding bouquet apart. Space is full of pions and gamma rays. In an eyeblink, the zoku machine is gone, replaced by a slowly expanding cloud of debris and fragments. The hunter swarm passes through it and is gone, heading back towards the main vein of the Highway at a considerable fraction of lightspeed.
And then everything is still and dark, and the space around Perhonen is empty. The awakened Oortian väki in its walls starts glowing with a familiar blue-green light.
Mieli, it says. I’m still getting Jean’s signal. He’s still out there.
Feeling numb, Mieli reels in the ship’s wings and modules into a more compact shape and steers them into the debris cloud, burning a way through with anti-meteorite lasers. They bring the thief in with a q-dot bubble, a helmeted, quicksuited figure, clutching a small black box against his chest, unmoving.
Mieli tells the helmet to open. The opaque metamaterial bubble vanishes, revealing the face the butterflies made.
Bastard. Mieli extrudes a q-dot blade from her hand and pushes it against the creature’s throat—
‘Wait!’
The voice is the thief’s. But that doesn’t mean anything.
‘Mieli, wait, it’s me!’
It does sound like the thief. She pulls back but does not let go. ‘What happened?’
The scarred face blurs and becomes the thief again, charcoal-dark eyebrows and hollow temples, covered in sweat. ‘I got Sumanguru’s Founder codes. The song I embedded in the zoku jewel – it was the same trick I tried before with Chen, except that this time it worked. A vir that pretends to be firmament, a trap. The hunters thought I was him. I told them to leave me alone. It worked.’ He talks fast, breathlessly.
‘You are not making any sense, you bastard,’ Mieli says.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ the thief says. ‘We won. And I have a plan.’
Mieli stares at him. She takes the Box from the thief. He does not resist. She crushes it slowly in her hand. Black shards spread in all directions like the negative of a slow, tiny nova.
‘You used Perhonen as bait,’ she says.
‘I did.’
‘You nearly got us all killed. Or worse.’
‘I did.’
She pushes him away. He floats across the cabin, a guilty look on his face.
‘Get the hell away from me,’ she says.
Mieli hides herself in the pilot’s crèche, exhausted, nursing her anger and mapping out Perhonen’s systems to ensure every last trace of the box god is gone.
‘How do you feel?’ she asks the ship.
Strange. Parts of me rebelled. I could not feel them anymore. All the gogols did what Sumanguru said. And there was a part that went into the Box and did not come back.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Mieli says.
But that was not the worst thing. That was when I saw you almost giving up, twice. You came very close to pulling the strangelet trigger, Mieli. And it was not a bluff.
Mieli says nothing.
You have been stretching yourself too thin. Keeping your promises and protecting me and letting the pellegrini change you. This time, you almost fell. And I was not there to catch you.
For a moment, Mieli is unable to speak. She is used to the ship always being there, always offering warmth, ever since the day she made her. But now there is a cold edge in Perhonen’s voice.
‘The thief did this to you,’ Mieli says. ‘He went too far this time. I’m going to—’
I will deal with the thief, Perhonen says. You don’t have to fight my battles for me. Just because you made me does not mean I did not exist before. You brought me back from the alinen, and I will always love you for that. You made me into a new being and you will always have my loyalty for that. But I am not only what you sang into me. Some things you can’t fix with words or a song like Karhu did with your tooth when you were little. Or by taking it out on the thief.
The ship’s voice resonates through its sapphire hull, all around Mieli.
So what if the pellegrini can make gogols of you? it says. Nothing has changed. They will be just as strong as you. And you will still be Mieli.
‘You have never spoken to me like that,’ Mieli says.
I have never needed to. But I will not watch you destroy yourself. You’ll have to do that without me.
Perhonen’s wings open, magnetic fields and q-dots like dew in a spiderweb, stretching for miles. They grab the gentle solar wind and push the ship back on course, towards the Highway, towards Earth.
Here’s what we are going to do. We are going to speak to the thief and go to Earth and go through with whatever plan the thief fed me to a tiger for and get Sydän back, so we can finally be free, all of us. Promise me you will not give up.
Shame washes over Mieli. Kuutar and Ilmatar, forgive me. ‘I promise,’ she whispers.
Good. Now please leave me alone. I need to heal. And then the ship’s presence is gone.
Mieli’s head spins. She sits still for a moment. Then she goes into the main cabin. It is bare and empty like her mind. Remnants of the battle debris and ash float around in the ship’s gentle acceleration.
Slowly, hesitantly, she starts to sing, simple songs, songs of koto, of food and drink and comfort and sauna. Slowly, skeletons of furniture start re-appearing, sketched by an invisible pen. It’s time to do some housecleaning, she thinks.
I look at my new face in the ship’s mirror wall, trying it on for size. The scars and the line of the jaw do not seem right. But the awareness of the Code is worse. It’s locked up tight in a mind compartment but I am going to have to use it again. Burnt bodies and filth and electricity. I shudder. That is what defines Sumanguru? No wonder he was upset after a few centuries inside the Box.
I close my eyes and concentrate on distracting myself from the pain with whiskey from my cabin’s tiny fabber. I could just turn off the aches, of course. But like my friend Isaac taught me a long ago on Mars, alcohol is not just about chemistry: it’s the meme, the feeling, Bacchus speaking in my head and making it all better. At least, that’s the theory. This time, the malt tastes a lot like guilt.
Nevertheless, I take a deep sip. As I drink, one of the ship’s butterfly avatars enters the cabin. I look at it. It says nothing.
‘Look, it was the only way,’ I say. ‘It had to think it had a way out. I could not edit the firmament in the Sobornost parts, it had to be the Oortian tech. I had to give it access to you to trap it, take a part of you in with me. I’m sorry.’
The butterfly says nothing. Its wings remind me of the jewel I saw in Sumanguru’s memories. The fire of the gods. Some of the Founder’s anger mixes with the emotion. Down, boy, I tell it.