“We should soothe her,” says Roche. “Look how worried she was! This whole time, while she was dancing around eating animal and partaking of ethanol, she was actually fraught with concern. My friends, she was thinking. Last I saw, they were adrift in a zero-gravity Network-deprived hellscape! Well, now you can calm yourself, Sarya the Daughter. As you can see, we survived.”
Mer drops his arm, then tosses his pitcher into the fire. He belches. “I musta killed fifty of these little guys on the Blackstar,” he says, “Didn’t matter. I still woke up here, and they still offered me a drink.” He gazes out into the darkness, his own small eyes disappearing when he turns from the fire. “Dunno why they brought me here,” he says. “I was doin’ fine on the Blackstar.”
Sarya sways. “He,” she corrects. “Not they.” She feels that she should have come up with something else to say by now, but nothing has come to mind.
Mer belches for an answer, then begins to feel around himself for another pitcher.
“Oh, don’t worry!” says Roche. “We understand, we truly do. We are mere acquaintances. Fellow passengers aboard the good ship Riptide. We may have saved your life once or twice, it’s true, but who has the time to keep track of such things? Though who knows: perhaps the galaxy would be in better shape had we left you to bleed to death in your cabin.”
“Thought about it,” interjects Mer, speaking to the fire. “Thought about killin’ her before that, too. Damn do-gooder suit talked me out of it.”
And now Roche’s brittle courtesy hardens. “Whatever happened to old Eleven, anyway? Perhaps you don’t care. It was a low-tier intelligence, after all. Even lower than the three of us—even lower than Mer.” He stands, paying no attention to the rumble emanating from the heap of fur across the fire. “Your new friend is…somewhat higher, I understand?”
She feels a flicker of anger, under her other mess of emotions, and she seizes it. That’s solid, at least. She fans it, bathes in its glow. “I apologize,” she says tightly, matching him courtesy for courtesy. “I should have brought Him home for your approval first.”
“That’s all we ask,” says Roche, lenses gleaming in the firelight.
“And yes, Eleven did save me, for your information,” she continues. “A lot of times. And it wasn’t just a sub-legal suit. It was my…friend.” For a moment she feels those massive impacts again, watches the front of the suit rip away in sparks and the scream of torn metal. “Eleven…gave itself for me,” she says quietly. She has an absurd urge to raise her cup in a salute to the fallen suit and wonders if that’s something she’s picked up from Observer.
“I know,” says Roche quietly. “I saw the whole thing.”
Sarya stares down into the cup, at the dark liquid inside it. “But I avenged it,” she mumbles.
“You avenged it,” says Roche.
She looks up. She pins Roche’s lenses with as steady a gaze as she can muster, in a sudden fury. “That’s right,” she hisses. “Network killed Eleven, and I killed Network. Here, at least.” She waves her cup at the black sky, sloshing some over her fingers. “You see all that?” she says. “Eight hundred systems, freed.” Finally, she feels that surge of pride she was looking for. “That is what a Human can do. I did it for my species. And, and—” She swallows the unpleasantness currently curdling in the back of her throat, a sensation she’s noticed more with every drink. “And for whoever else never got a fair chance, because of Network. All those species who didn’t—who don’t—get to choose their own destinies. Their own paths.” She swallows again, trying to remember how righteously Observer had expressed it. “We have rights,” she explains. She waves up at the eight hundred stars again, with a cup now too empty to spill. “A species has the right to choose its own path. A species has the right to do what it—what She—wants to do. What She chooses to do. And Network doesn’t have the right to stop us, because—”
It’s terrifying how fast Mer can move. He must have waited for her to blink, because she literally did not see it happen. One eyeblink ago he was staring into the fire five meters away, inebriated and morose; now she is off the ground and dangling from the handful of ten-centimeter talons buried in her hair and the collar of her utility suit behind her head. Mer, observes her slowed mind, has more teeth than she realized. They are as sharp as Widow blades. They are so long that he can never quite close his mouth. And his breath is rank, made of meat and blood and worse. A predator’s breath.
“Where are your rights now?” rumbles Mer through those gleaming teeth.
His breath folds around her and chokes her. She is so shocked that she doesn’t kick, she doesn’t strike out, she doesn’t do anything but cling to the arm behind her head and try to support her weight on anything but her hair and throat. Her mind, so recently filled with righteous fire, is now kicking into survival mode. Don’t move, it tells her. “Mer,” she whispers out loud. “What the hell—”
“This is me—how did you put it?” He clicks a razor talon against his teeth as if deep in thought. “Following my own path.” His mouth is gigantic, black lips forming words around gleaming black teeth. “It’s clear you don’t know what you’ve done. It’s clear I woulda saved about a trillion lives if I’d killed you when I met you. How many will I save if I kill you now?” He makes a sound then, a booming, hissing roar that may or may not be a laugh. “Call it my destiny,” he says softly.
She dangles from his talons, absolutely sure that Observer is about to rescue her. So Mer could shred fifty of him without breaking a sweat—Observer has trillions. They could pile on top of Mer’s massive shape. They could exhaust him until he could not lift a talon. They could wrest her from his grip. But they’re not, and suddenly she realizes why. Observer may be a god, but there are certain things that even a god cannot stop. Her death at Mer’s talons and teeth is a future that Observer cannot prevent. It’s too late to prevent it. It would take Mer a quarter second to rip her body in half, and all he needs is a trigger. He could literally eat her, right here in the middle of Observer’s brain, and there would be nothing Observer the godlike mind could do about it.
“Wait,” says Roche.
Sarya releases a breath. Roche, thank the goddess. Roche, you are underappreciated. Roche, if you can talk this monster into releasing his hold, you can name your reward, you have the word of Sarya the Daughter that—
“Hand,” says Roche.
She hears a series of clicks and pneumatic hisses, and suddenly her hand loses its grip on Mer’s fur. It feels much lighter and colder, and far more useless. Something crawls down her body, then scampers through the firelight toward Roche.