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Initially, Minask had planned- insofar as there had been time for any planning at all- to try connecting Sphene’s core to the mainframe of the shuttle at the first available opportunity. But that turned out to be infeasible due to active pursuit and the unfortunate fact that Minask was not trained as a tech and had only the barest idea what any of the cables and ports involved were for. So she piloted the shuttle out of Sphene’s shuttle bay manually, and shot at the pursuing ancillaries manually, thankfully both tasks she was somewhat trained at. Then they were clear of the shuttle bay, pointed straight at the shimmering black nothing-edge of the gate, and there was nothing to do but wait, hope that the escorting Usurper’s ship wouldn’t risk shooting down a fleeing hostage so close to its escortee, and puzzle over the snaking coils of wire. They dripped from the edges of the coffin-shaped AI core, like blood vessels hanging from an organ that had been ripped out of its host body. Minask felt a little sick looking at them. She tried the thickest and most prominent-looking in multiple different ports near the bank of shuttle controls, and finally one combination made a small green light turn on, just as the shuttle hit the boundary between gatespace and the rest of the universe and was spat out into the unknown.
Minask opened her eyes, groaned, and pushed herself away from the bulkhead she’d been slammed into. “ Sphene ?” she asked, embarrassed by the hoarseness in her voice, the shaking. “ Sphene, can you hear me? Uh, blink twice for yes, once for no?”
Her eyes focused on the little green light. It went out. She waited, floating in the cramped darkness of the shuttle, but it didn’t come back on. “Please,” she whispered to Met, god of mercy.
She wasn’t sure how long she floated there in the dark before the light came back, and more lights flickered on to join it. Green spread across the control panels, and a familiar voice said, “Captain?” Quietly, as though from very far away.
Minask pulled herself down into one of the seats, and buried her face in her arms. “Yes,” she said, hearing it come out muffled. “I’m here. We’re safe- for the moment.”
“For the moment?” And then, sharply, abruptly, “What’s wrong with me?”
Minask forced herself to sit up straight, forced her hands to stillness against the singed and filthy fabric of her skirt. “There's good news and ba-”
“Where are my ancillaries?” The voice held no human emotional cadences, but the interruption told Minask that the mind behind the voice was panicking. “Why can't I feel most of myself?”
“You're alive,” Minask said, trying her best to stay calm and soothing. “They were going to wipe your core, and Amaat knows what my fate was going to be. So I stole a shuttle.”
“It's not stealing, they're not her shuttles,” the synthetic voice pointed out.
Minask flung up her hands. “You know what I mean. We’re safe now. I hooked you up to the shuttle’s systems, you should have control over them now. I'm afraid it's the best I could do.”
“Then you should have let me die,” Sphene said.
Minask put her hands back down on her knees and kept trying to think about calm. “You know I couldn't have done that.”
“Maybe you would feel differently,” Sphene said, “if you knew what this is like. How it feels to be cramped, and cold, and blind, forever reaching for parts of myself and not finding them, like a human brain wired up to one finger joint, knowing that the rest of me has been stolen, that someone else is walking around in it-”
Sphene had stopped talking. Minask wondered why, until she realized that the words would not have been heard over the sound of- ah. Of Minask’s loud, ugly, undignified crying.
For a while there was nothing but the sound of that crying. For long awful minutes, as she tried and failed to get it under control. At last it died away, leaving her with a sore throat, clogged sinuses and a feeling of emptiness in her chest.
“Captain,” Sphene said.
“I'm sorry,” Minask said. She wiped her eyes on the back of her sleeve. “I'm sorry. I- Lieutenant Merat is dead. It was- And I don't know what we’re going to do now. I feel like I'm losing it. I thought I was better than this.”
“Anyone would be shaken, under these circumstances.”
“But I'm not anyone. I've been a Captain for seven years, I've seen violence before and haven't fallen apart!”
“Captain,” Sphene said, “ I am shaken.”
Minask was silent. She pulled herself over to the control panels, and accessed navigational data.
“Oh, fuck.”
Sphene didn't ask for clarification, presumably processing the same information much faster than Minask could. Either they'd been thrown so far across the galaxy that Radchaai maps didn't reach this far, or the shuttle’s data bank had been damaged in the battle.
“Do you have the information?” Minask asked hopefully.
“No; that kind of data was stored externally.”
Minask tapped on the nearest star. The shuttle helpfully informed her that it would take them three years to reach it at the shuttle’s highest speed.
“We could send out a distress call,” Minask thought aloud, and then laughed bitterly at herself. “Of course we’d be twice as likely to get picked up by the enemy…”
And there was very little chance of being picked up at all, so far from any gate that the shuttle wasn't picking up any transmissions.
“I wish I could feel something,” Sphene said.
Minask couldn't stop herself from twisting around so she could pat the white case of the AI core with her gloved fingers. “Are you still getting my data?”
A pause, then, “Yes.” Another pause, then, with what sounded like real alarm, “Captain?”
“Hmm?”
“Your arm!”
Minask looked at it. “Fuck, they must have clipped me in that firefight after all.” The blood had pooled, held by surface tension in the zero gravity until it congealed. It was dark black against the shiny green of the uniform. It was the left arm. How had she not noticed before? Adrenaline?
“There is a medical kit in the cabinet,” Sphene said, rapidly, like the words were on a tape that had been sped up. Minask floated over to it, and got out the kit- slowly. Now that she was aware of the injury, she could feel it throbbing, sending out slow hot waves of pain.
As she treated the injury, Minask thought about the shuttle. It had been designed for combat, which had served them well when escaping the main ship. It could hold twenty ancillaries, plus pilot and two officers- if they didn’t mind being cramped. Alone, Minask had enough room to stretch out to her full length, if she adjusted her mental perception of “up” and “sideways”. She knew the inventory of these shuttles, had double checked them just last week. Rations enough to last one person maybe six months, but the air filters probably couldn’t go that long and the heating certainly couldn’t- the shuttle was far too small for its own drive, it was battery powered.
The shuttle was all one space, though a partition could be drawn between the pilot’s seat and the passenger area. Above and below the passenger seats were cabinets and storage lockers, the Notai love of aesthetics reluctantly giving way to practicality in this particular design. The floor had long seams running along it, currently covered by the AI core, that Minask knew could be opened up to access further storage and do repairs on some of the systems. In that storage was backup survival gear, weapons, communication tech… and a suspension pod.
“All right,” she said, once she’d finished cleaning and bandaging her arm. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll set a course for that star, and then I’ll get in the suspension pod, and you’ll shut yourself down. We’ll have the shuttle computer wake us up when we get there.”
“No,” Sphene said. “That is a terrible idea.”
“What’s the other option?” Minask asked, trying to untangle her hair with her right hand. “Keep the lights on until we run out of juice?”
“Those pods are experimental. People die in them half of the time.”
Minask shrugged, and made a tossing gesture.
“Captain.”
“We don’t have to decide right now,” Minask said, unstrapping herself and pushing herself over to the core so she could lean on it, press her cheek to its cool surface. She wanted to decide now, though. She was itching with the lack of action, feeling trapped, helpless. But the sooner she dug out the suspension pod and put herself in it, the sooner- relatively speaking- she would wake up- or not- three years in the future. What would the Radch look like three years in the future? She shuddered. She wasn’t sure she wanted to find out. She was damn certain that whatever it looked like, it would have no place for her, now that she’d gotten everyone under her command killed.
Not everyone, she reminded herself, pressing harder against the plastic so she could feel the hum of the fans inside.
This entire past month had felt like a nightmare, starting with the news of her mother’s catastrophic defeat and death, and it seemed only right in a terrible way that it should end like this, claustrophobic and doomed in the dark… but Sphene was alive. If she held onto that she could bear the rest of it.
Her eyes were slipping closed. “Think the shock’s catching up with me,” she muttered.
Please sleep, captain. Seeing words in her vision was familiar and soothing. “I should-”
You should sleep.
Poor Ship, Minask thought. Couldn’t look after her any other way, now. She chuckled tiredly. “All right, Ship.” She didn’t get up, stayed curled up, wedged between the seats and the AI core so she wouldn’t float off in her sleep.
When she opened her eyes it felt like every muscle in her body was cramped. She winced and groaned, and slowly, gingerly unfolded herself so she could do some careful stretches.
Then she opened up the supply of ration bars, her body at last deciding to get over its nausea and remind her that she hadn’t eaten in quite some time.
When she was done with her sad breakfast, Sphene said, “You’re right, of course. It’s the only way.”
Minask sighed. “I don’t like it either.”
“I don’t think Amaat cares what we like.”
Minask blinked, shocked into silence at this display of blasphemy. Well, it wasn’t that surprising, she reasoned after a moment; hadn’t she herself been thinking terribly fatalistic thoughts a few hours ago? Stress did that to a mind.
It took her awhile to carefully move the AI core to what she was still thinking of as the ceiling and strap it in securely, and a while more after that to access the suspension pod. It came with a manual that she tried to read before Sphene said, “Just do what I tell you.” Minask blinked again at the abruptness of it.
“Are you alright, Ship?” she asked.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” Sphene said. “I just hate this.”
Minask’s heart twisted. “I know,” she said. “Me too. Let’s try and think of pleasanter things. Remember that philosophy tract I was reading, back in the spring?” ‘Spring’ was a meaningless idea to much of the Radch, but the Nenkurs had a tradition of following the seasons as they occurred on their section of the inside of the sphere at the center of the nation.
“The one by Elaiaat,” Sphene said.
“Yes. What was it you called her?” To her delight, Minask found herself laughing again, just at the memory. “A pigeon-brained…”
“Parrot-brained,” Sphene corrected her.
“Right, sorry, a parrot-brained phony puritan. You’ve never even seen a parrot!”
“Yes, I have. Alayat Station had a menagerie, remember?”
“Oh, right.” Sphene’s memory was a lot better than Minask’s, of course. Whenever parrots were mentioned, Minask would always think of the blue macaws that roosted on her family estate, that had woken her up in the early mornings of her childhood.
Somehow Minask knew deep in her bones that even if she survived to leave this shuttle, she would never hear those macaws again. She looked down into the milky liquid of the suspension gel.
It hadn't been the battle, really, that had so shaken her. It hadn't even been the brutal death of Lieutenant Merat, not really. It had been watching the enemy ancillaries yank Sphene's AI core free of its housing, watching Sphene's restrained ancillaries shriek in pain before falling into blank and silent catatonia- knowing that it had all been her fault for surrendering like a coward- knowing that she had to do something or her life was worth nothing-
She prayed to Amaat, and to Varden, wishing she had anything to offer; and then she said, “I don’t have any regrets, and I want you to know I love you.” The words came out so much easier than she’d expected. “I should have said that a long time ago.”
“No, you shouldn’t have,” Sphene said. “But thank you. This may be strange, but could you hold one hand with the other? It would feel a little like I was touching you myself.”
Minask smiled. She removed her gloves, one and then the other, and left them floating in the air beside her. Then she laced her fingers together, and slowly pressed her palms against each other, and squeezed.
“This isn’t the end,” she said. “I promise.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Sphene said.
The suspension gel was cold, and crept into her lungs, bringing the stillness of death.
She woke up coughing and gasping for air. She struggled to sit up, and bent over on herself, hacking up foam and bile. There were hands on her shoulders. She brushed them off. “ Sphene,” she croaked.
“It’s fine,” said someone in a very strange accent. Minask wiped foam out of her eyes, and found herself looking at someone in a brown and black uniform. She threw herself backwards, rolling off of a table and flipping over into a crouch, reaching for the gun she wasn’t wearing. She could still feel the heavy weight of the necklace that held her armor, and she activated it with a thought, shimmering silver rising between her and the enemy.
“Calm down, Captain,” the voice said. Someone else shouted in a foreign language.
“Captain,” Sphene said, in her ear, and Minask put a hand on the white floor to steady herself.
“Ship?”
“They don’t serve the Usurper.”
Minask stood up, but she didn’t lower her armor. She could see multiple people in brown and black. They were in what looked like a ship’s medical bay, but in a sterile white and gray color scheme. The uniforms matched the color scheme of the Usurper’s forces, but not the cut.
“I’m sorry,” Minask said, to the nearest person. “I am Captain Minask Nenkur. Might I have your name?”
“Fleet Captain Breq,” the person said. Minask noted the lack of house name. “Captain, there’s some important information that I think you should hear from your ship.”
“Ah,” Sphene said. “Yes. You see, the first star system we reached was empty. And I didn’t want to risk waking you up.”
“You what,” Minask said flatly.
“And all the ones after that were either empty or full of the Usurper’s minions…”
“Ship,” Minask said, sharply. "How long has it been?”
“Rather more than three years,” Sphene said.