“You stole aboard—No one steals aboard mindships!”
“The old ones, with blind spots all over their corridors? Easy.”
“You—” And then professional instinct took over. “You told me you couldn’t function in deep spaces.”
“I stole a blend,” Long Chau said. “From the kitchen stores. Looks like the sisterhood is keeping it in reserve to help its inductees remain sane in deep spaces. I have to grant them this: they have no intention of breaking anyone past repair.” The admission sounded like it cost her.
Too many things, too many problems. Alarms were going off at every level of The Shadow’s Child’s processes. And she still didn’t know if she could trust Long Chau. “They’re feeding the same blend to different people? You can’t do that. Blends are tailored to one person.”
“I didn’t think you could.”
“You drank one,” The Shadow’s Child pointed out.
“Not much choice.”
Why was she surprised Long Chau would get herself into trouble, and fast? And the voice...
She knew exactly what was wrong with the voice. “You’re drunk.”
“I think not.”
Not quite, but it was the fastest way The Shadow’s Child could explain that Long Chau’s thought processes were currently warped by a blend not meant for her. “Is Tuyet onboard?”
“She and Grandmother Khue and a host of other folks I don’t know. I’m not sure I get your sense of urgency.”
“Then why are you calling me?”
“So you can rescue me, of course. Coms look to be down as well. They’re putting a backup transmitter together, but I’ll have lost patience long before any rescuing does happen. Not to mention functionality.”
Blends. A delicate balance of compounds fed to one person, monitored to be sure they had no adverse effects. Expensive, of course, and the sisterhood was tight for money. They’d pay someone not very much. Someone like Nguyen Van An Tam, the brewer who gave Grandmother Khue her cheap blends. And they’d get a shoddily made job, and...
Breathe. In a room at the heart of her was her core—her self, plugged into connectors and then into the ship, hanging in the vastness of space, and nothing could touch her there.
An easy way to deal with folks like Grandmother Khue and Long Chau was simply to crank the self-confidence as high as it would go. It worked, though it wasn’t subtle. But with folks like Hai Anh—mousy and quiet, fighting with low sense of worth, unaccustomed to trusting themselves—blends like these made them reckless. Terminally drunk.
How did a mindship let someone out into deep spaces? If the person—Hai Anh—themselves did it. If in the airlock, instead of putting on the unreality suit as anyone functional would, they stepped outside, so intoxicated they thought their shadow skin would protect them.
Tuyet.
Tuyet was young, and scarred; and with the same kind of tricky profile as Hai Anh. Not someone whose self-esteem could be so casually boosted.
Not without consequences.
“Shadow’s Child? Ship?” Long Chau’s voice, barely tinged with concern. “What’s happening with Tuyet?”
She still didn’t know what Long Chau wanted with Tuyet, or what had happened seven years ago. But—
There were two people, currently, who could help Tuyet: her and Long Chau.
And she was too far away. She’d just put in a request for a mindship to rescue The Sorrow of Four Gentlemen, who now hung in deep spaces—not on the edges, where she’d taken Long Chau, but deep inside, where Hanh and Vinh and her crew had died, where time stretched to an eternity with no meaning, and space curved back onto itself—he was wounded and broken, just as she’d once been—but no, she couldn’t afford to think of that—she needed to focus on what was happening. Too many ships around the orbitals, and Traffic Harmony was unresponsive.
It was Long Chau or no one. “I’m getting help,” she said, sharply. “Just keep an eye on Tuyet.”
No answer, but then why had she expected one?
Traffic Harmony suddenly came online. “I’m not sure I see the need,” they said in an emotionless voice. “It’s not an emergency. The mindship’s critical functions are still working.”
“Someone—” The Shadow’s Child tried to sort out her thoughts, to convey more information than the fragmented panic she felt. “Someone is going to die.”
“I don’t understand. Surely, if a mindship is needed, you could go?”
The thought of diving into deep spaces, of losing herself, all over again— “Can you just find another mindship? Any mindship? Someone who can come and help them?”
Long Chau’s cool voice in her ears, taking priority over the com with Traffic Harmony. “I’m afraid we have a problem.”
“We what—?”
A silence, accompanied by an odd rush. “Can you see where I am? Exactly?”
“Yes, but—”
“Good,” Long Chau said. “You have a centiday. Perhaps a little more, but I wouldn’t count on it. And now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll need all my concentration.”
“What—?”
“You’re smart: you can most probably make the necessary deductions.”
She’d expected the call to cut, but it didn’t. What happened was that Long Chau fell silent, and she heard a familiar rush of air: a mindship’s airlock, dilating open, and then profound silence, only Long Chau’s breath, coming slow and measured.
A centiday. The time it would take for a human being in deep spaces to start dying.
“Please tell me you have an unreality suit,” she said to Long Chau. If Tuyet didn’t have it...
She could almost hear Long Chau say she wasn’t a fool—but again, there was no answer.
Long Chau had turned on the suit’s sensors. That was now the only thing The Shadow’s Child was getting from her: a body, tumbling away, and a shadow skin torn to shreds by the pressures of unreality, all of it growing larger and larger as Long Chau propelled herself to catch Tuyet. Tuyet’s eyes were closed, her face swollen—her skin flushed the colour of bruises, changing and shifting in successive washes of alien colours.
A centiday.
If she stopped—if she thought, truly, really, about what she was going to do—she would freeze.
“Traffic Harmony?”
“Yes?”
“I need to enter deep spaces.”
A heartbeat—a slow, agonising one—before the authorisation came through, tinged with
