“They are being attended to. They have sustained damage.”
“That is my fault.”
“They are not dead.”
“I am glad.”
“Do you feel well enough to attempt to stand – slowly?”
“I can try.”
Qe hopped back a few steps to give me room as I eased up to my elbows, my knees, one leg, both, catching myself briefly on the wall as I swayed, steadied, breathed. Every part hurt, but the pain was muffled, smothered by medication. I felt too tired to ask what. The quan watched in silence, then said: “The ship wishes to speak to you.”
“That’s good. I’d like to speak to the ship.”
“The ship can speak to you now, and is listening, but suggests that you might wish to go to the airlock port before you communicate. It will better explain the situation.”
“You’re not going to space me, are you?”
“We would not have saved you if that was our intent.”
“That’s what I thought. Lead on.”
The quan led me down a hall, shoulder-tight, a thing for scurrying drones not organics used to a little more space. Qe scuttled along the wall just in front of me, limbs sticking to metal with a soft magnetic clatter as qe moved, stopping occasionally to turn qis head just a little too far back on qis neck to check on me, waiting for me to catch up as I pressed my way, shoulder to metal, behind qim. Around me, the ship hummed, soft and warm, but I could hear the hissing of compartment doors closing at my back, areas venting where I had been and that no longer needed to waste energy on pressure and air.
The airlock had a viewing port. Sometimes even a quan’s full-spectrum sensory array may fail, and qe will be forced to rely on that most basic of physical receptors – looking out of the window. At the gesturing of my guide, I pressed my nose against it and stared into the dark.
For a moment, I didn’t know what I was seeing.
Saw nothing at all.
Then the slight sense of wrongness, the thing that wasn’t quite right about the black, adjusted in my field of vision, and I understood.
The sphere was far enough away that I could just take in its edges, and it was only because I had read about it, studied it, heard the rumours that I had any sense that it was massive and distant rather than near and small. In the deepest dark, there was nothing to measure it against, no sunlight to glint upon it, no sweep of familiar stars against whose disruption I could judge its shape.
Not it.
Qim.
The Slow… a Slow… the Slow – these distinctions were so hard to pin down – sat there, darker than the dark, directly outside the airlock of the ship, a perfect sphere of black. I thought for a moment I would cry, and didn’t know why; pressed my hand intothe glass of the airlock door as if I could push through it, reach out to touch the Slow itself – felt a sudden surge of fear that I might do exactly that, that having been rescued I might turn to shadow and thought and drift back out into the night that had nearly consumed me. Yanked my hand away. Turned to my guide with tears pricking my eyes and no idea why and mumbled: “I would like to talk to the ship now.”
The little quan didn’t answer.
Instead, a voice, warm and familiar, spoke from all around, rippled down the corridor, echoing and bouncing away on hard metal. “Hello,” said Rencki. “It is good to see you again.”
Chapter 56
“Rencki,” I stumbled. “you’ve had some upgrades.”
“Indeed,” qe replied. “Although even with processors and memory banks as mighty as mine, I’ve had to make a few sacrifices. You’d be amazed how much capacity arcspace navigational systems take up; I fear I’ve lost some of my social graces.”
“I hate to tell you this, but I am not sure social graces were ever your highest priority.”
A chuckle.
The sound thrummed off the walls, hummed through the narrow floor beneath my feet, rolled back towards me again and away, outlasting its creation. I wondered where Rencki’s speakers were, couldn’t imagine qe had much use for such things. Suspected the nearest one was inconveniently located some distance away, that qe was having to balance sound in an acoustically challenging space to talk to me.
“Perhaps you are right. But I have kept a surprising amount of raw sensory data from our journeys together – sentimental, perhaps, although I would argue that some of the things we witnessed deserve to be recorded as sight and sound, rather than mere compressed narration.”
