Watching someone fire a chemical weapon in vacuum is surreal. There’s no sound; just a puff of particulate briefly illuminated as the oxidizer contained in the propellant cartridge fires. And if you weren’t braced, you got the humorous outcome I was currently experiencing.
I guessed I was right, and Farweather had braced herself, because I was pretty sure she’d fired again when a disk off to my left shattered into a thousand tiny knives, but I didn’t see her get knocked spinning. Well, if she could do it, I probably could too.
I folded space-time to stabilize. Gravity was my friend.
In so doing, I realized I had inadvertently hidden myself in the pocket I’d made. Like a kitten in a blanket, I was tucked away and would be invisible unless you bumped into me.
“So that’s how she’s been doing it,” I said. To myself. Because I was alone in my pocket universe and nobody else could hear me.
Well, now or never.
I couldn’t see her either. But I could feel her. She was large as life and out in the open.
Maybe that was the trade: Stay erased and still and quiet and be invisible and safe. Take an action, claim space, be noticed—and open yourself to attack by everyone and everything.
Well, it was probably time for that last.
I had dropped myself into . . . not quite white space. But something not unlike white space. Now I had to get myself out.
It was easier than I had feared. I just unfolded what I’d reflexively folded, and was back in my home line of space-time again.
And there was Farweather.
She stood at the dead center of one of the disks, facing away from me, her weapon in her hands, scanning. She looked invincible as she noticed my reappearance—eyes on the back of her head? Koregoi senso?—and began to swing to cover me.
But I could see what she couldn’t.
There was a sticky thread of wet silk adhered to the underside of her platform, its paleness vanishing into the darkness beyond the range of my ability to see it in this terrible frail light.
I wanted to throw something to distract Farweather. I didn’t have anything to throw. So I grav-slid up behind her while she was turning.
I kicked her in the face just as she brought the gun to bear.
She should have gone sailing, but her boots were locked to the disk—probably with a fold, because magnetism doesn’t work on silicates. The whole thing—pirate and perch—revolved in a lopsided orbit after I hit her, the center of gravity somewhere around her thighs. Her arms flung up; she lost the gun. I tumbled the other way, twisting to avoid the disk’s edge more by luck than by skill. My diaphragm spasmed; I couldn’t get a breath; I tasted blood. She must have gotten a piece of me, too, though I hadn’t felt it happen.
I made a grab for the fabric of the universe, and hauled myself into a stable orientation. Just in time to see Cheeirilaq abseil in with strands of webbing gripped in two of its manipulators. At a distance, two disks slammed together and splintered, yanked by the threads the Goodlaw was swinging on. I shrieked inside my helmet as it plummeted directly at the spinning disk with Farweather still riding it.
It was going to get its little feathery feet sliced off.
I still had my gun. And all I had to do was aim carefully enough not to hit Farweather . . . or Cheeirilaq.
Well, if I hit Farweather . . . honestly, she’d done enough to deserve it. Oh, I’d probably still feel bad about it. But she was lucky I was still trying not to.
I aimed and pulled the trigger.
The disk shattered. Under the momentum of the spin, pieces flung away like knives. I ducked, but I’d timed the shot right, and I didn’t get holed that I noticed. Neither did Cheeirilaq.
Farweather dragged herself to a halt facing me at an angle. She glared at the hand where her gun had been and, finding it still empty, began to move toward me with a grim determination to rend in her expression that I recognized from a bar fight or two on a couple of seedy portsides.
I raised my gun. She never got the chance to connect.
Cheeirilaq barreled into her back like a spiky green battering ram, its horrifying raptorial forearms scissoring so fiercely I expected to see Farweather float away in three large pieces. She stayed intact, though, even when the Goodlaw gave her a single savage shake—though she did flop limply after that. One of her hands was free, and it floated beside her like a trailing ribbon, utterly unguided.
Cheeirilaq tossed a loop of silk at another mirror and hauled itself—and its prize—over to stand on a flawless silver surface that swarmed with reflections. It looked down at the body in its raptorial forelimbs. Gotcha.
I guess we were close enough to communicate now.
Farweather lay limp in its grasp, unconscious or stunned. A thin mist of escaping air fogged the area around her. Cheeirilaq turned her in its manipulators like a toddler looking for the end of a carrot. Its tiny head with the enormous, faceted eyes rotated from side to side, glittering like an emerald-studded stickpin.
“Cheeirilaq?”
Forgive me, the Goodlaw said. This will be painful, but it is inevitable.
It pulled one razor-edged leg—the film of its suit must adhere to the carapace behind the razor edges of those blades—and plunged the hooked tip into Farweather’s torso, low, just above her pelvis, on the left.
“Cheeirilaq!”
A red mist of ice fountained. Farweather convulsed. Cheeirilaq steadied her with the other forelimb. When it pulled the impaling one back, it came dragging a mesh of gory wires and a mollusk-like segmented shell that curved in such a way I thought the concave side must have been intended to cradle bone.
An orange light flashed through the blood.
Cheeirilaq flipped the thing overhead, a long movement from a single joint like the lever arm of an atlatl. It sailed away, blinking softly, while the Koregoi mirrors flashed away from it like schools of geometric black fish.
It exploded there, harmlessly, soundlessly.
“She did have a bomb inside her.”
She did.
“How did you know?”
Cheeirilaq cocked its head. The case was hot.
Infrared.
“She’s leaking, Cheeirilaq,” I said.
What? Oh yes, I see. Its mandibles clicked inside its film; the suit mikes picked up the noise. It sounded hungry, but I thought that particular clatter was the mantid equivalent of a sigh. I suppose the civilized thing to do is to take her into custody and heal her wounds.
It used some reaction mass to drift over to me, towing the mirror with it.
“I suppose it is.” I launched myself to the plate next to Cheeirilaq and balanced there. I patted it lightly with a suit glove on the wing covert. “Come on, old friend. Let’s go home.”
Friend Haimey, it said. You’re leaking, too.
I looked down. There was no pain, but a halo of frozen, rose-red particles of blood drifted near a gash in the side of my suit. The bullet had hit me, after all.
I hadn’t even felt it. As I watched, my heart beat, and another shower of crimson snowflakes joined the rest.
“Oh dear,” I said.
Hold still, the Goodlaw said. As I watched, it webbed the hole in Farweather’s suit closed. Then it turned to me. This is first aid only, you understand? it said. You are not to undertake anything strenuous.
I glanced over at the pirate and Jothari ships that were following us down toward the Baostar, gaining on us, slowly encircling the cluster of disks that sheltered us. It might have been kinder of Cheeirilaq to let me bleed out among the stars. But I was cold, and getting colder, and I didn’t want to die.
“Yes,” I said. I spread my arms, wondering why it didn’t hurt more than it did before I remembered that I’d turned all that off, and I was probably in shock. Shock, I told my fox. Do something about that.
It was already doing whatever it could.
The shock and the tuning didn’t help me when Cheeirilaq stuck two manipulators into my wound, found and pinched off the spurting artery, and tamponaded the whole mess shut with an enormous sticky ball of webbing. It managed me with half its appendages, while managing Farweather with the others, and then it swept me up with a raptorial forelimb as well.
The first Jothari vessel outpaced us, falling toward the occluded sun just a little faster than we were. It turned to bring its guns to bear.
I wondered if they would ask for a surrender.
Cheeirilaq carefully shifted its grip on me so I could see, but it wasn’t pressing on the wound.
You held on to your gun, it said. That is well.
CHAPTER 29
THE BAOMIND DID NOT SLOW. But neither did the flock increase its a. Perhaps it was already falling as fast as it was able. Perhaps it didn’t recognize the threat.
More ships overhauled us. We were englobed. I struggled for awareness, pushing against the fuzzy comfort of unconsciousness as if I were fighting the blear of an unwise drunk. “Something—” I murmured to Cheeirilaq. “Something is coming.”
It wasn’t Singer, though I wanted it to be. I would have felt Singer as a point, a heaviness moving through the folded sky. This was . . . a wave. A wall.