But it wasn’t empty. To judge by the occasional scattering of luggage and jumbled blankets, a few passengers who were unable or unwilling to pay for a cabin slept here. And quite a few of those had unpacked again, if they’d ever packed at all, and were apparently resigned to going directly back down.
Some passengers also appeared to use the mostly empty corridor as a place to stretch their legs, so that even once Ingray and Garal had strolled all the way around the circuit as casually as they could with the spider mech skittering along beside them, and Tic had settled on a likely door in an empty stretch of corridor, people would still walk by far too frequently.
Finally, after nearly five minutes of too-casual loitering by the chosen door in the hope of a break longer than ten seconds, Tic said quietly to Ingray and Garal, “All right. I’m going to do something drastic. It may mean I’ll have to stay behind to cover for you.”
“But …” began Ingray. But it seemed as though there would never be an opportunity otherwise, and this wasn’t really Tic, just a mech. Tic was safely away on his ship somewhere.
“Don’t worry about me,” said Tic. “Here, just in case.” The spider mech spat out a shiny black blob and handed it to Garal. “If I’m not with you, put that on the airlock controls. It should do the trick.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Garal.
In reply the spider mech spun around and reared up to walk on its four hindmost legs, waving the front ones menacingly. It stretched a half dozen of its eyes at the nearest strolling passenger and whistled, “Do you look? At what do you look? I look, too! Am I food? Are you food?” Only to turn its attention on the next passenger as the first one fled. “And you, do you also look?”
Minutes later, their stretch of corridor was clear. “Quick now,” Tic whispered then, scuttling back to them, “before someone sends elevator staff to deal with us.” He reared up again and leaned against a door, flattening and spreading to cover it entirely, until Ingray could read the words AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY through its gelatinous body. Its legs seemed to have disappeared, though eyestalks protruded at seemingly random places. Ingray suppressed a tiny shudder as it pulled itself back into its not-quite-a-spider shape.
“Time to go,” said Tic, as the door snicked open. “My other mechs aren’t quite here yet so we may have to wait for a …” Footsteps sounded, and voices, someone saying, It was right up here, Officer … “Go! I’ll see you soon!”
Garal grabbed Ingray’s elbow and pulled her through the door as the spider mech scuttled up to the Safety officer who rounded the corridor’s curve. “You!” whistled the spider mech, waving three or four clawed legs, eyestalks writhing. “I will make such complaints to you!” The door closed again with a click, and Ingray and Garal stood in the grimy quiet of a service passage. “We can’t wait around, even here,” said Garal.
“I know.” Ingray took a steadying breath. She was still dizzy, though whether that was from knowing she was about to climb outside the elevator, or the close call moments ago, or from Taucris’s kiss back on the lower level, she wasn’t sure. “Let’s go.”
They found an airlock easily enough, and a rack of vacuum suits and helmets. For a few terrifying and frustrating minutes it seemed as though there wouldn’t be one to fit Garal, but e said, “Start checks on yours, I’ll look at the next airlock.” Five minutes later e was back, dragging a suit. “Yours good?” e asked. Quietly.
“Yes.” Ingray finished her last check. And then froze. It was time to put the suit on, check once more, and then go outside. Where there would be nothing between her and hard vacuum but the thin shell of the suit. She’d done it before. Had thrown up in her suit, but she’d passed the test. In theory she was fully qualified to do this, to go out into the suffocating nothing of space. Where she would die if she’d made any mistake.
“We’ll be all right,” said Garal, checking over eir own suit.
Ingray wasn’t sure if e was saying it for her benefit, or for eir own. She feared any reply would come out breathy and shaking. Feared she was hyperventilating, and yes, her tingling fingers said she was. Calm. Just stay calm. She’d done this before.
Garal made eir last check. Looked at Ingray. “Are you all right?”
“I’m scared,” admitted Ingray, and yes her voice was breathy, but it didn’t shake quite as much as she’d feared it would.
“I’m not,” said Garal, with the smallest suggestion of a smile. “I’m fucking terrified.” Ingray couldn’t manage to laugh at that. “Suit up,” Garal continued. “We go through the airlock and step out on the ledge and wait for Tic. That’s all we have to do.”
“Right,” agreed Ingray. She girded up her skirts. Shoved and pulled herself into the suit—it was more or less her size but hadn’t been made to fit someone quite as round as she was, and getting it on properly strained the limits of the suit’s adjustability. She closed all the seals and tried to pull on her helmet, but it wouldn’t sit right until she pulled out her hairpins. And then stared helplessly at the pile of pins in her hand. Keeping them wouldn’t do her much good—her hair had only stayed up as long as it had because a servant had done it, back at Netano’s house.
Garal snapped on eir own helmet and closed eir last seal. Looked a question at Ingray.
She stowed the pins in a pouch on her suit, snapped her own helmet into place, stopped herself from testing the communications—they didn’t want anyone hearing them, noticing them—and before she could think too hard about what she was doing she touched the outer airlock control and stepped through the hatch when it opened. Garal came into the lock beside her, triggered the door closure, and pressed the shiny black blob Tic had given em over the inside airlock controls. They stood, waiting for the lock to depressurize. Hopefully without sounding any alarms that might bring elevator staff. Ingray counted, trying to time her breaths, trying to keep them deep and even and not let them go jagged and gasping the way they clearly wanted.
After forever, the outside door swung open. One more breath. Another. And Ingray stepped out into sunlight.
The ledge here was two meters wide. With a rail, thank all the gods of the afterlife. Above towered the elevator cable—or really, cables, a massive bundle of them, shining white, here and there refracting the sunlight into thin rainbows. And looming above that, Hwae. Night darkened half the deep blue Iths Ocean, and east of that the Ados peninsula was laid out clear as a map, striped and whorled with a dozen shades of green. Fine, wispy clouds made a gauzy white veil over the green and brown of Southern Ustia, and though her feet were firmly on the elevator ledge Ingray clutched the rail, terrified. She’d seen this before, from inside the elevator, from inside Zenith Platform, but there it had been merely deliciously disorienting. Out here, she felt that she would slide off the ledge and tumble away into the ocean overhead.
Garal touched eir faceplate to hers. “Look at your feet, Ingray.”
“I can’t!” she gasped.
“Look at me, Ingray!”
She dragged her gaze down. Garal’s own eyes were wide, the first visible sign of fear or anxiety she had seen in em.
“There,” e said. “That’s better. Don’t look up again.” Which was nearly impossible; the broad, bright, rainbow-shot cable led so inexorably up to Hwae, so near and so huge. “If you panic and anything happens to you, you’ll never get to kiss Officer Ithesta back.”
Ingray made a breathy sound that began as a laugh and ended as a sob. “How long until Tic gets here?”
“Not long,” Garal said. “Maybe fifteen minutes?” E seemed so calm, but eir own voice trembled, just a bit.
I can’t do it, she wanted to say, but movement caught the corner of her vision. She turned her head, slowly. Carefully. A black, many-eyed spider mech scuttled along the ledge. “No, he’s here. He’s here already.” She lifted her faceplate away from Garal’s and raised her hand.
The spider mech raised one claw, ran right up to her, and wrapped six legs around her. Another mech came scutt
ling around the bend of the ledge, and then another. And another. Ingray hadn’t realized that Tic had so many of them.
It wasn’t over. It would still be hours and hours. But she didn’t have to do anything now, and she could close her eyes and Tic would take care of the rest, and eventually they would be aboard his ship, where she knew they would be safe. “See you aboard,” she said, though of course Garal couldn’t hear her now their helmets weren’t touching. But e’d seen her mouth move, said something in reply that Ingray couldn’t interpret, as two spider mechs put their hairy legs around em.
The mech already holding Ingray reached out one claw and tugged on her hand that still held the rail. “Oh,” she said, and made herself let go, and then the surface of the ledge lifted away from her feet and she lost any sense of up or down. She closed her eyes and tried very, very hard not to scream. Tried to think of nothing but counting her breaths.
She lost count, lost all confidence that she hadn’t repeated the same few hundred numbers over and over, thought maybe she’d dozed at some point but there was no way for her to be sure. The view outside her faceplate was uninformative, claustrophobic black. She could look at the time just by blinking; she wouldn’t need to query the system communications to do it. But she was afraid of what she’d see—that it had only been a few minutes and there was still all the rest to get through. Or that it had been days and she’d somehow missed the destination, was drifting aimlessly away from anyone and anything that might get her out of the prisoning suit. She shouldn’t have done this. She should have stayed on the elevator and risked facing Planetary or Elevator Safety, or Omkem military mechs.
An alarm buzzed in her ears. She opened her eyes and saw the flashing orange of an alert. “Tic?” she gasped. “My air is getting low.” He’d said he’d bring extra; the distance to his ship was too long for a single vacuum suit’s supply. But, she realized, trying very very hard not to panic, she hadn’t seen any of the spider mechs carrying tanks.
“Not long now,” came the thready reply, barely audible through her faceplate. She had no idea where it was coming from, had never seen any of the spider mechs use a mouth to speak. “Stay calm.”
“I’m trying,” she said. But of course talking, and breathing hard the way she was now she wasn’t concentrating on taking each breath perfectly calmly, would just use up more air. She closed her eyes again and struggled to slow her breathing. Which worked for a while, but eventually her fingers were tingling again, and she must have been clenching her teeth, because she had the beginning of a headache. But Tic had said to stay calm. Had said it wouldn’t be long. She had no idea how much time had passed since he’d said that. It would be all right. She was not going to throw up here in the suit, because even though the suit would almost certainly clean up most of the mess it was still not a good idea to vomit in microgravity, and besides, she just wasn’t going to. There was a thunk; she’d run into something, or something had run into her. Down returned suddenly to the universe, beneath her feet. The ship, it must be. The gravity was a relief, and all she had to do now was wait for the airlock to cycle, and she could do that. She could wait, now she knew she was safe, and she was still not going to throw up. But it was going to be a near thing, and her head was hurting worse, and she couldn’t keep from gasping, and her helmet separated from her suit with a click and it felt so, so good to actually feel like she was getting air when she breathed again. She fumbled at the seals of her vacuum suit, and one of the spider mechs that had brought her here pulled at the others and helped her out of the suit.
She stood a moment, unsteadily, in a dimly lit compartment. Beside her a spider mech was helping Garal out of eir own suit, and e seemed to be all right. And a voice that Ingray couldn’t put a name to, but that seemed oddly familiar, said, “Oh, it’s you!”
Ingray turned toward the voice. Slouching in the doorway, in rumpled white coat and trousers and gloves, was the Radchaai ambassador to the Geck, Tibanvori Nevol. “I didn’t know you were coming along. But no one here tells me anything. You’re not claiming to be Geck, too, are you?”
“There isn’t anything like tea here,” said Ambassador Tibanvori, twenty minutes later, “or I’d offer you some.” She’d taken off her rumpled white coat but still wore a white shirt, trousers, and gloves. “The Geck humans drink warm water with salt in it in situations like this.” She grimaced. “I’ll have some brought if you like.”
“Thank you, no,” said Ingray. She sat beside Garal on a ledge—or, it wasn’t a ledge, exactly. More of a growth that rose out of the inner surface of the shadowed room. Which was narrower at the entrance than where Ingray and Garal sat, with no corners at all that Ingray could see, and half a dozen large and sinuous protrusions in various places, including the walls and ceiling. “I’m sorry about your coat.”
Ambassador Tibanvori waved that away and sat on a nearby protrusion. “Thankfully, you don’t seem to have eaten much before you set out. Still, I must say, the next time you plan to make a long journey in a vacuum suit—though it’s not the best idea to begin with—you might want to be sure you have enough air. Is your head feeling better?”
“Yes, thank you, Ambassador.”
“Is this ship still docked with Hwae Station?” asked Garal.
“It is,” Tibanvori acknowledged. “Treaty or no treaty, we’d have been better off leaving days ago. But no, the ambassador had to find this Tic Uisine person. And her ship. His ship.” She sighed.
“What’s happening on the station?” Ingray asked. The last she’d heard, military mechs had shot their way out of the docks, and that was still all she knew. “Is there still fighting? Do you know …” She knew people who lived and worked on the station. Netano was there. She risked a quick query to the station’s various news services, but all she found were warnings to seek shelter and remain there. That was a bad sign, she thought. But she would not allow herself to think too hard about that until she knew what was going on. Nuncle Lak certainly either knew where Netano was right now or was looking for information about her, and e would share what e knew when e knew it. There was no need for Ingray to add to the chaos by sending out queries of her own.
“I have no idea what’s happening on the station,” replied Tibanvori. “And you shouldn’t, either, if you’re claiming to be Geck.”
“I’m not,” said Ingray. “Garal is.”
“Well, all I know is, there was some shooting on the docks a day or so ago, and we’ve been left alone.”
A person came through the door, the first person they’d seen besides Tibanvori. Dripping wet. Tall, broad in an odd way that Ingray couldn’t quite make sense of, their head rising straight out of their shoulders as though they had no neck whatever. They seemed to be wearing a very tight-fitting greenish-brown suit of some sort, with a series of dark almost-horizontal lines on either side. Something about their face was just barely familiar, but Ingray couldn’t think why. “Ingray Aughskold,” the person said in a quiet, strangely breathy voice. “Garal Ket. Come with me. The ambassador would like to speak with you.”
“Of course,” said Garal, as though this were merely a courteous social invitation. E rose, and Ingray did as well, and, with a polite nod to Ambassador Tibanvori, followed the person out. Not into a corridor exactly—there seemed to be no corridors on this ship, just a number of strangely shaped compartments. Ingray remembered Tic saying he’d had his own ship refitted—had it been like this on the inside, when he’d stolen it?
But she would have to remember not to say that here. Had to remember that as far as she knew, Tic had bought his ship quite legally.
At length, the person brought them to a room like any of the others, except for a pool of dark water, about three meters wide, with four curved and snaking seats around it. “Sit,” said the person. “Do not get in the water. Some of what’s in it is not good for you. The ambassador will be here in a moment.” And the person dived into the pool. In the brief instant they were visible below the surface of the water
, Ingray saw those horizontal lines flare open, and she realized with a dizzying shock that the person had not been wearing any sort of suit at all, and those lines had been gill slits.
“We might as well sit down,” said Garal. Ingray turned to look at em. “Sit down, Ingray,” e repeated.
“That person had gills,” said Ingray.
“Yes,” agreed Garal, as they both sat on one weirdly curving bench. Ingray thought about saying So that was what Tic wanted to be. What he’d thought he was going to be when he grew up. What he still resented not being, it seemed. She opened her mouth to say it but stopped and closed her mouth again.
She flinched as something green and glistening surged up out of the still-sloshing water. It rose, dripping, a smooth and shining blob that leaned over and … oozed onto the margin of the pool. A hole appeared in it, one that stretched wide and then pursed. “Garal Ket,” it whisper/whistled. “Ingray Human.” There was more of it below the water, a massive, dark shadow. This must be the ambassador herself, then. One of the aliens that no one Ingray knew of had ever actually seen. Well, besides Tic, of course.
This was important. She had to think straight. And tired and confused as she was, Ingray knew how to handle this. “Ambassador. Thank you for …” She wanted to say for inviting us but of course there had been nothing like an invitation. “Thank you for having us here.”
“You are Tic’s friend, I think,” said the green blob, as though that were a reply that made sense. “Garal Ket, you have no legal status as a human, yet you are a human, and you have claimed to be Geck. It only remains for the Geck to accept your claim. You have done this in fear of your life; I have heard many things and seen many things and so I understand this. Tic Uisine intended that this should remove you from danger. I know you are not clutchmates, you cannot be even by the standards of humans. I have known many humans. I understand humans. Not everyone understands humans so well; humans are difficult to understand, even when they are Geck. And Tic Uisine …” The ambassador hesitated, then made an odd, sighing sound. The green blob had shifted somehow to a bluish color. “Tic Uisine is not Geck anymore. I do not wish to say it, but it is clearly so. Still, I understand him well. You are Tic’s friend, I think. We are considering what to do with you, Garal Ket.” The blob flared a brighter blue for just a moment, and then turned pale green.