Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear

Author:Elizabeth Bear
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saga Press

CHAPTER 17

GOAL NUMBER THE FIRST: DON’T get caught.

Okay, then, what’s my plan of attack for that? Or the plan of evasion, more accurately. Step one, avoid contact with Farweather, either through senso or physically.

I didn’t have any illusions about my ability to take her in single combat. For one thing, while humans traditionally divided themselves up into lovers and fighters, I considered myself living evidence that that was a false binary, having no skill with either set of tools. I belonged to a third group, equally useful: I was an engineer.

For another thing, I was pretty confident that Farweather hadn’t come to this alien environment unarmed. Unlike me. Because she was a fighter, every centimeter of her.

I could try to set a trap. But that was likely to fail and also likely to move me up on her priority list. Right now, I figured she probably had her work cut out for her in regard to exploring the Prize, mastering its systems, and getting where she wanted to be going, unexpected hitchhiker and all. If we got there, she’d probably have additional resources to throw at the problem of me, which meant that her best use of resources was to defend herself, defend the Koregoi ship’s key systems, and bide her time until she could meet me with overwhelming force. My earlier fears were realistic, but probably a little overblown, because if she decided to take the risk of coming out to get me it could result in potential failure of her mission objectives and possibly getting clobbered or killed herself.

She’d want to avoid that. I mean, I didn’t think I could take her, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t want to be cautious.

Sure, Haimey, I heard myself tell myself in Singer’s voice. Because caution has certainly been her watchword all along, and you have no evidence at all that she’s interested in capturing or subverting you for her own reasons, whatever the strategy behind those reasons may be.

I could try to ambush her. Probably, eventually, I would. But not todia. Because right now I needed an advantage.

So I had to assume that she would be defending herself, and I had to assume that she might, in fact, come after me. So while she was consolidating her control over the ship’s systems and setting up whatever defenses she was setting up, I needed to be learning the structures of the Prize like the warrens of the clade I grew up in. I needed to be a mouse in those warrens. A stainless steel rat in the walls.

Just as well to have something interesting to fill the standard hours with. All my book files were back on Singer. Without reading material, I needed something to occupy my time. Memorizing an alien spacecraft the size of a medium station would probably keep me busy. Unless it got me caught.

Or killed.

I hadn’t sat still while I was doing this thinking, either. In fact, I’d found something fascinating, which was that those organic-seeming corridors and the spaces they connected were webbed with service crawlways.

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