[Be gentle!] cried the pilot intelligence. [You’ll hurt her!]
Thus it was that when the hatch hissed open, the scene inside the four-passenger ship was one of violence. A two-meter-tall stick of a being held a tiny bundle of fur and eyes aloft, shaking her and swearing, while the ship itself cried for peace. And in witness, standing on the landing ramp, was the waystation keeper.
This was just bad luck for Sandy’s handler. Xe had only worked with a very select group of Sandy’s people, and was unfamiliar with the diversity of the species. There were those few who were bred for intelligence, the Thinkers: small, fragile, weak in everything but mind. But then, there were others bred toward vastly different goals. For example: the two-hundred-fifty-kilo mass of muscle, talons, teeth, and killer instincts who had just glimpsed a member of his own people being violently abused.
[Sorry about that], said the Strongarm (tier one-nine) a few seconds later, as he licked the handler’s blood out of her fur. [I saw what xe was doing to you and I just—I don’t know what happened. Instincts took over, I guess.]
Sandy shivered and drew herself into a ball. Her coughing had disappeared without a trace but her trembling, if anything, had increased. She lifted her eyes to the Strongarm’s, fighting with every scrap of her self-control to keep her true emotions out of her gaze. She had prepared for this moment for a long time, rehearsed it even; it would be a pity to ruin it with a face full of self-satisfaction.
[Oh, thank the Network], said Sandy. [I was so frightened.]
[Don’t mention it], said the keeper. [I’m Mer, by the way.]
Sandy’s rival: tier two-point-nine. Sandy’s handler: tier two-three. The handful of loaders, maintenance drones, cleaners, and the sanitation station: tier one-seven, on average. Mer the Strongarm: one-nine. Roche the android, Hood the Red Merchant, and finally this Human that stands in her doorway now, shaking like it’s going to fall apart: low twos, all of them. A year of good and bad fortune, divvied up among these lower intelligences. All of them witnessed it, most of them noted it, yet not one imagined that there was no luck at all. That they were each, obliviously and in their own small way, contributing to the goal of a higher intelligence.
They were helping a seven-year-old tier three run away from home.
Luck is not magic. It’s nothing but hidden strings and planning. The Networked galaxy has holes in it, it has give, it has blind spots and unregulated spaces. It is not difficult to teach a sanitation station or an elevator a new trick, any more than it is to distract a maintenance crew or confuse a scheduling intelligence. Getting someone a job at a waystation—even if it requires an accident to remove his predecessor—takes no more than patience, preparation, and knowledge of the Network. The galaxy is more dense with minds than it is with technology, and those minds have this in common: they do not look upward. When a high-tier accomplishes the most basic feat of manipulation, a low-tier shakes its head and calls it luck.
That’s if they notice anything at all.
Like this Human, who stands in her cabin doorway and stares at Hood’s faceplate with confusion written all over its smooth and nearly eyeless face. Its low-tier mind is formulating a theory right now, trying to explain to itself why Sandy would have a bounty hunter’s faceplate pinned to her wall. The Human will wonder, over the next few days, what that was about. It will add to Sandy’s high-tier mystique in the Human’s mind. And when Sandy needs it, it will be there.
Sandy watches the Human, her annoyance building. It’s been in her room for nearly three seconds, and it hasn’t said another word. That’s it. It had its chance for conversation. Time to impress.
[I have already sold my cargo], says Sandy. [All of it], she adds significantly.
The Human’s eyes turn to hers. Its mouth opens slowly, as if its owner is now unsure what to do with it. Somewhere in its feeble mind, it is now realizing that Sandy is many steps ahead of it. It does not have a plan for this eventuality. It probably constructed vague plans for two or three branches of potential conversation: one if Sandy seemed reluctant, one if Sandy was generous, and so on. It had no plan labeled if Sandy is smarter, faster, and better than me in every way.
[You are welcome to come with me], continues Sandy. [I am meeting my first buyer before we leave this solar system, and the second on the Blackstar. Between the two of them, they have spoken for all the cargo on my ship.]
The Human’s mouth closes slowly: so embarrassingly, nauseatingly slowly. Sandy watches the emotion spread over that furless face, soon to be followed by confusion when the Human realizes it’s been outsmarted, yet is getting exactly what it wanted after all.
“Well, that was easy,” says the Human.
Sandy blinks a smile. [Sometimes you get lucky], she says.
“Mornin’, partners!” says a raspy voice from the galley ceiling, in an accent Sarya has never heard before. “Pilot intelligence Ol’ Ernie here, he/him etcetera, independent, two-seven, yadda yadda, nice t’ meet y’all. We’ll be gettin’ to know each other until y’all’s Network transfer slot, which is in…let’s see…four days. Hooboy, on a budget, are we? Shoulda known when I met y’all’s ship intelligence—don’t talk much, does it? Well, that’s all right; I talk plenty.”
Sarya sits in the galley, sweat rapidly flooding her utility suit. She can barely hear Ernie’s voice over the roar of the ship’s overtaxed cooling system; Riptide is working hard to keep its occupants alive. She tries to ignore Mer pacing the corridor—he has to be absolutely dying in all that fur—while doing her best to unwrap a food bar with wayward and sweat-slicked fingers.
“Gotta say, y’all’re lucky y’all got Ol’ Ernie. Granted, this Blackstar’s got a few trillion of us on the payroll, but Ol’ Ernie’s the best. He’s gonna save all y’all’s hides, ’cuz he can tell y’all ain’t given half a thought to radiation. If y’all’d ever been this close to a star before, y’all’d have a better paint job. But Ol’ Ernie’ll take care of y’all. He’s just gonna slide y’all behind this big ol’ freighter so y’all don’t get overcooked. Sound reasonable? ’Course it sounds reasonable, this is Ol’ Ernie we’re talkin’ about.”
And so begins day eighteen. Sarya now counts time not from the destruction of her home but from the moment she invited the worst parts of her mother into her own mind. That, it turns out, has made the bigger impact in her life. She has almost grown used to the strange, typically violent thoughts popping up at inappropriate times. She has accepted that evisceration will always seem like a valid solution to any social conflict. And the dreams—even now, it’s best not to think about the dreams. But it’s not all bad. She sees how her fellow passengers view her. They never knew the idiot kid from Watertower’s remedial classes. They’ve only known Sarya the Daughter, an intelligence who will cut her own arm off if it will get her closer to her goal, a Human with a Widow raging behind her eyes. They see an intelligence with a falsified registration, the individual who killed the bounty hunter who captured them—at least as far as they know. She would almost dare to say…that they respect her.