It was a desire for more camaraderie on the ship’s part that precipitated the next crisis.
They were finally about to be done sitting still at the station and would be en route again. The Thing felt delight.
But the journey would not be the same as it had been. Talon no longer played warball. He could not be coaxed or ordered into it, no matter who tried. This was what gave Niko and Dabry the most concern, but they hid that from the others. Although Gio, who had traveled with them the longest, gave them a hard look from beneath furrowed brows every once in a while, most of the others did not notice much. Atlanta would have liked to play, but she figured eventually, he would come around.
But the other person who noticed, and did so in a decided way, was the ship. It had, after all, hollowed out a large portion of its interior for warball and left it that way, which required a certain amount of energy and bandwidth, it informed Talon.
“I don’t care,” said Talon. He was, as ever, in his quarters, having no preparations to make for the journey other than to brood over how much he didn’t want to make it. He was curled around himself on the cot in half-lion, half-human form. He directed his voice at the opposite wall, from which vantage point the ship had been both speaking and surveying him. “Let it rot.”
The ship said indignantly, “I am incapable of rot.”
“All things rot. All things die.” He burrowed his face farther into the pillow, seeking the fading scent.
“If either of us were actually rotting, it would be much more likely to be you,” the ship said, feeling piqued. It was, after all, trying to help him, although in doing so, it might be ignoring certain things Niko had said to it about leaving him alone. But this also failed to rouse him, and the ship decided to try stronger measures.
“I will take you to the warball room,” it said.
“No.”
“I will take you there whether you like it or not.”
That did rouse him. His ears flattened and he snarled, teeth exposed, “Try it.”
The resultant noise brought most of the crew at a run.
They found Talon wrapped in the Thing’s tentacles, although fighting with all his might and main. Great frilled black ribbons of material extended from the walls to hold him, or tried to, because he was shifting every few seconds, trying to throw it off and slashing with his claws, roaring all the while, the deep-throated roar of utter rage that had summoned them.
“What in the name of Sky Momma?” Niko shouted. “Stand down. Stand down.” But it was long moments before Talon stood freed, panting to catch his breath, shuddering deeply. His eyes rolled up in his head and he pitched forward onto his face.
“What’s wrong with him?” Atlanta gasped.
“Thaumic drain,” Niko said as Dabry knelt to gather the unconscious form. “Changing that fast, that many times? It could have killed him. Still could. Let’s get him up to Lassite’s quarters. He’ll know what to do.”
Lassite was ready long before Dabry burst through his door, carrying the boy in his arms. He had laid out a restorative drink and waved scented grass through the air to cleanse. He had been meditating for the past two hours.
This was another of the moments for which he had prepared himself mentally long ago. He did not know all the details, the ins and outs, but he knew that Niko’s crew members would require healing at some point, and for them all to stay on the Golden Path, he would need to be able to save them.
But he was worried. The time that was coming up … Well, there were pieces that were clear and then there were the pieces that were anything but. Pieces shot through with guesswork and voids that could not be guessed at, ragged as the breaths Talon was drawing, unpredictable and erratic.
This was not the worst of such patches, but it was one of the worst, and he had been dreading it. It had something to do with the Gate they were approaching, he knew that, but he also knew that to say anything of warning would have the opposite effect of what he wanted, and panic rather than calm them. No, best not to say anything, no matter how much he hated being the only one carrying the burden.
The boy had drained himself till his body held so little magic it could barely sustain his heartbeat. Shifters didn’t just use magic, they were magic; it was an integral part of them and that was why using it too hard could literally burn them alive.
Niko had followed Dabry and was in the corner, talking to the ship in tones that did not bode well for You Sexy Thing. It was true the ship could have killed Talon, but another truth was that the boy would be useless unless he healed past his twin’s loss. Lassite did not entirely understand the sibling bond—it was not something his race was capable of—but he thought of it like an extra limb. It had been torn away, without warning, and with brutal suddenness. But the loss of a limb was survivable, was something that a being learned to deal with.
Lassite’s eyes rested on Dabry, who held Talon slumped against his chest. He could sense the sergeant’s emotions, worry and fear and the dim, aching echo of holding his own child. Again, a bond Lassite could not understand but must acknowledge existed, and one so strong that it had to be factored in.
Lassite reached out to take the youth’s hand in his own. “Anyone who is not essential, leave,” he said tersely, and then, unexpectedly, a word they rarely heard from him. “Please.” He could not deal with distractions; Thorn was almost dead and Lassite had only moments to snatch him from the Gates before he passed through them.
He didn’t bother to pay attention to Niko shooing the others out. Dabry still held Talon close. Lassite closed his eyes, reached out with the senses he rarely used. The feeling of cold crept over him, pulling him down into the void where Talon was. He held himself away from it, no matter how strongly it tugged.
A flicker, the smell of musk and the softness of golden fur, the fiery sweep of claws … everyone’s mindscape was different, but Talon’s was a chaos of sensation, of emotions boiling like a storm.
There. He grabbed, plunged himself into the shadow mass and grappled it to him, no matter how it fought him.
The ferocity of its resistance shocked him, so much that he almost let go. Without his twin, the boy did want to die, and the urge toward life was so weak that the opposite urge threatened to overpower it … No time to think of that, but he would have to tell Niko.
He gritted his teeth, hunched his shoulders, and continued.
Agonizing inch by inch, he hauled his friend back from death, and Talon fought him each and every moment of the way.
When Lassite opened his eyes, blinking against the light, he saw the others gathered now around them. The concern in their faces was apparent, and he knew that it was as much for him as it was for the boy in Dabry’s arms. That concern warmed him, a comradeship he had never found among his own kind, and how strange was that, to find it here? His mind swept in dizzy circles, sparking odd thoughts and reactions, and an undercurrent murmured that he had overextended himself. He focused on his breath, slowly reconnecting with his exhausted body, which ached down to his bones, a dull throb in time with his heartbeat.
Talon came back to consciousness all of a piece, unfazed, undizzy, curling around himself in grief that he was still alive. For a little while, he had thought the pain of his twin’s absence would end, and now that had been snatched away from him too.
He opened his eyes to glare at his rescuer, then closed them and let the void of sleep take him away temporarily. He would express his anger later, when he was not so tired.
“I hate you,” he murmured, and fell into darkness.
Once all was settled, Talon placed in his cabin and Lassite tucked in his own bed, Niko returned to her cabin and paced its circumference as her mind wheeled in thought.
She couldn’t have the ship trying to help a crew member like that again. She had almost lost Talon. How soul-wrenching would that have been, to see both die? One alone almost killed her heart. And Lassite—she had never seen him so tired before, and if thaumic drain had nearly killed Talon, then draining himself to heal that surely had done the Sessile no good. No, the ship had to be dealt with.
Niko had never interacted with a living ship before this one, let alone “owned” or whatever it was that the relationship between herself and the Thing was, which was much more along the lines of leased or, more accurate, borrowed. There was no way she and the others would have been able to pay the huge amount of money that actually leasing a bioship would cost.
This was primarily due to the process by which bioships were created, in vast interstellar cradles that later became playgrounds, sometimes deadly ones, for a crop of bioships. When they came of age, they would be pitted against each other and the weakest ones culled, sometimes by the ships themselves.
Most ships with AI could hold conversations; she’d had to deal with plenty of those while in the Holy Hive Mind. But with those, you were usually conscious that you were speaking with an engineered thing and that its responses were based on the unalterable programming layered into the system and would not change over time. The closest thing she had seen were the great battle brains that the Hive Mind grew, and those were far slower than her ship.
The Thing was self-teaching, self-altering, and also capable of significantly greater thought speeds than its mechanical counterparts, to the point where it could maneuver anywhere with uncanny grace and precision.
She’d thought it amusing that it was so fascinated by the idea of emotions. Hadn’t worried when it started to be able to perceive the ghosts. And that lack of fear had kept her from thinking about the fact that it had become even more self-aware than any of its counterparts. No one in the crew completely understood that process, but the ghosts must have had something to do with it. And however Lolola had circumvented its programming.
Why hadn’t she had the thought to have it checked over by someone who knew something of such things? She’d been lulled into thinking of it as a person rather than a piece of machinery, and you couldn’t trust machinery to tell you when something was going wrong.
Nor people, really, she thought cynically, then shook her head. “Ship,” she said.
“Captain?”
Was it her imagination that its voice was subdued? How much did it understand of what it had done?
She said, “You could have killed Talon.”
“I thought I would help him. I thought if he played warball he would feel better. All he does is sit and sit and sit in his cabin and all that space I made is never used. So I exercised initiative.”
“It’s fine for you to exercise it when it comes to things that don’t affect the rest of us. But maybe you’ve got too much time on your hands. Maybe you should take up a hobby.”
“A hobby?” the ship said. “What hobby do you think I should take up?”
“Uh,” Niko said, unprepared for this challenge. “Perhaps you could make some sort of art.”
“I have already created my logo,” the ship said proudly.
“And it’s a very nice one,” Niko said.
The logo had been the ship’s very first foray into self-expression, back in the days before its association with Niko, and it was somewhat obsessed with it, placing it on every object that it created, no matter how small, insignificant, or disposable. The default pattern for any surface was an intricate series of interlocked logos that was a texture that had, by now, become ubiquitous to them all: It sprawled across the bed-bags, the towels and toiletries, writhed overhead in the corridors, and coated both the underside and, if possible, rim of every dish or utensil it created. A multicolored version of this now covered the outer black surface, an improvement which it told Niko it had suggested to Arpat Takraven, only to have it rejected.
“So I should make more art with my logo? Or pursue a new project?”
“Definitely a new project,” Niko said, mostly driven by curiosity to see how this might manifest. The ways of a bioship were many, varied, and utterly unpredictable, but this didn’t seem as though it had much potential to go wrong. “What sort of project do you think you might undertake?”
There was a very long silence as the ship cycled through literally millions of possibilities.
“I … am not sure what to choose,” the ship said at length. This perplexity (or so it thought this emotion should probably be labeled) was something new to it.
“There’s no need to choose something immediately,” Niko said, relaxing. Problem solved. This would keep the ship occupied enough to not be exercising any more initiative. “Take your time and perhaps gather input from the others.”
This would be her own little experiment, predicting what each of them would suggest. Dabry would not want competition, so he would not suggest any of the culinary arts, but he might be savvy enough to think about something that would complement his own efforts in some way, like napkin folding or floral arrangements.
On the other hand, there was no guarantee that the Thing’s aesthetics and his own would be a good match. Could you do a floral arrangement in the shape of a logo?
Gio loved music. Did that mean that he’d suggest it or that he’d try to avoid it? She thought the latter—he was picky about his music, preferred Earth stuff, and the later the century the better, although he did exhibit a marked preference for hominid over cetacean.
Milly—who knew? She’d been a dancer, but how could the ship enact that skill? Perhaps through some sort of surrogate machine of the same kind as the servitors it used as its device-hands, but that seemed unlikely, nor had Milly and the ship seemed particularly close. Niko cast back mentally and was unable to come up with any memory of the feathered Nneti suggesting an inclination for any other form of art.
Atlanta, on the other hand, was reasonably easy to predict: It would be something that she had learned about in the Empress’s court, and it would require expensive materials or else a significant investment of time. That was the sort of art that the people of the court favored, and if it weren’t for the risk of the former and much costlier option, Niko would have put high odds on whatever it was that she came up with.
Skidoo … Niko raised an eyebrow. Well, she knew the Squid’s preferred art form. She’d be surprised if the idea of all the possibilities of intimacy with a bioship had not already occurred to her overly amorous crew member and been proposed, if not followed through on, depending on what the ship’s reaction had been. At least she’s conscientious about consent, she thought.
Lassite would suggest something connected with his scriptures. The Sessiles were famous for the orientation of their arts with their religion. If Niko wasn’t careful, he’d end up converting the Thing to all his nonsense about her Golden Path in the course of working with it to explain whatever religious iconography or style or material he advocated. That seemed far from advisable.
As for Talon—well, if the ship could safely stir any enthusiasm in the boy, that would be a double good. He was still a walking wound, as though the empty space left by his twin were there perpetually, a void ready to intercept any happiness.
“I could make a documentary videorecording for playback by historians,” the ship said.
“Not a good idea,” Niko said.
“You think it is beyond my capabilities?”
“I think it insufficient challenge for you. Look for something more complex and sophisticated and therefore worthy of you.”
The ship played the noncommittal noise that was its equivalent of their conversational hedges. “Hmm. This will require further thought.”
“As I said, you should take your time. And perhaps consult my input before making your final decision. And the sergeant’s.”
She hoped that between the two of them, they could head off any potential disasters, but in Niko’s experience, if something could go awry, it usually would. Well, perhaps that was good enough, and she could turn her mind back to Talon.
She’d seen the look on his face when he’d roused, when Lassite had pulled him back from the brink of death. The boy didn’t want to live if it was a life without his twin, and that thought spidered through her with cold dread. How far would he go in pursuit of that relief now that the chance had been proffered and then snatched away? Would she have to be watching him for an actual attempt at joining Thorn?
“Are we prepared to launch?” she asked. “Nothing around us to get caught in the backflash?”
“Everyone is ready, including myself,” the ship said with joy. “We are clear of the station.” It was time to move again! That was infinitely better than sitting in one place. There were so many things to see in the Known Universe and the Thing was resolved to see as many of them as possible.
“All right,” she said. “Here we go.”