Sin and Grace - 33. Sin (Patreon)

I came to when the shocking cold of the vacuum hit me like an open-handed slap. When I opened my eyes, I could see that I was on the wrong side of the cargo hold's small airlock, which was meant for external maintenance access if one of the larger locks for loading got jammed or something.

Funnily enough, I wasn't scared this time even as I floated backwards and away from the Cassandra. My lungs ached as my autonomic reflexes tried to force me to draw in a breathe that would not come, but then the pain faded. The core of my spot started to glow and suffused my body with warm energy that extended all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes.

I looked at my hand, grimacing as the sight of my own bones appearing as shadowy forms deep inside my orangey-gold glowing flesh. Thank the void there was no mirror out here. I wasn't ready to look at the shape of my own skull.

This time, I had more experience with moving in the void and willed myself to stop drifting. It wasn't exactly 'stopping', since Cassandra was still in motion. Fortunately, I was still within her shield envelope, which made it a little easier to match her pace.

It was a good thing I couldn't breathe at present, or else I might have choked on my own air as I remembered the attack in the hull.

Fuck, there was an intruder aboard. Xe must have already disabled Brando and Grace. Then they lured me down into the hold.

I looked around the broad, ghostly white hull of our ship. I didn't see any other bodies floating out here with me. The shield envelope was still active, which was programmed to keep things that were ejected from inside the hull near to the ship. Amanda had to partially disable the shields when we dumped waste so that it wouldn't follow us all the way to our next port. If the intruder had jettisoned any bodies, I'd be able to see them.

My heart beat slowed down a little as I orbited the main shaft of our vessel. No Grace. No Brando. They must still be on board.

That meant I'd been the one too dangerous to keep. Why?

The answer was obvious, in retrospect. I had control of the shipbots; a tiny premade army available for the taking, so long as their general was out of commission. That would explain our ShipNet outages. Someone had been using our feed to slowly feed malware into our computers.

I could counterattack, so long as I was somewhere inside the ship. The intruder couldn't disable my auxiliaries without killing me—so that's what they'd tried to do.

The intruder was probably watching the lock xe had just tossed me out of. I was honestly surprised that he hadn't just shot me, but—actually, no. I was willing to bet the intruder had been hiding in that stupid cargo container. The temperature inside was just right for most sapient lifeforms and they'd forced us to take the container on while we were away from the Freeport. It was theoretically possible to baffle bio-scanners, especially when you were hiding as 'live' cargo. Weapon scanners were notoriously difficult to fool. Even that stun stick the intruder used on me had probably been assembled from parts while xe was waiting for their moment to strike.

I needed to go back inside. My experience with hitching a ride to safety on Mimir's exterior had taught me that this current state of affairs was not infinitely sustainable for me. It was something I could do, for a time. It was not my natural, comfortable state of being and I needed to be ready to fight as soon as I got back inside.

I flew down the length of Cassandra, looking for an alternate air lock.

As I passed, I saw the hullbots I'd first noticed on my shipwide bot audit after I hired on with Grace. They starting to stir as I passed and then would settle. They weren't actually on ShipNet, so I only had limited ability to interact with them. Seeing them in person, I realized they were emergency ejection bots: the kind meant to catch people who'd been blown out an airlock or experienced a cable break during EVA. They'd jump out, catch the victim and hunker down on the hull to keep them warm and breathing until rescue could arrive.

They were reacting to my biometrics as I passed by, but I was moving too fast to trigger their rescue programming. Now that I thought about it, I must have been moving a bit like a human-shaped rock that had pierced the shields and was flying by.

Was Grace and Brando in one of those?

No.

So far, I couldn't see that any of the hullbots had inflated. They were all still in a passive, monitoring mode.

I spotted a small access hatch that looked like it led to the Works level, but something moved out in the darkness when I started to approach the lock.

The emptiness around me flexed and I realized there was something outside of the shields.

Once, long ago, I'd had a chance to watch an immersive haptic VR simulation of a scuba diver in one of the deep oceans of Earth. The diver was recording themselves interaction with a blue whale, one of the largest mammals on the planet. The whale was massive, compared to the diver, with a mouth that could easily fit three adult humans laying against one another. The cover art for the VR disc was an image of the diver seeing themselves reflected in the whale's massive eye.

I felt exactly like that diver as I perceived, but could not see the entity outside our shields. I could also tell that it could perceive me too.

More than that, it felt—curious? About me?

Without meaning to, I got closer to it.

It still appeared to be indistinguishable from the emptiness of space, but it had a definite psychic presence. It was a little like I'd lived my entire life in a quiet room and now suddenly something was in there with me, making a subtle noise.

It huffed at me and if there was air, I think it would have blown me backwards—not violently, but I would have gone ass over elbows for sure. As it was, I automatically drifted backwards.

'What are you?' I wondered and was startled when it both heard me and responded.

It didn't speak using language. It gently placed images and emotions into my head of it sailing through space as a solitary traveler, or not entirely solitary. There were others, sometimes. The whale analogy fit surprisingly well. It had a pod sometimes and sometimes it was solitary. Sometimes the members of the pod had other little things with them that they seemed fond of. The whale didn't understand it, but didn't feel like it needed to.

Then it shared a sort of blended memory of one of those pets or companions—next to its perception of me.

'There's other people like me?' I asked before I remembered it wasn't using words.

I could tell I was sending it a hopeless jumble of thoughts, images, and concepts. Too much of my history was blending into what I was trying to ask; the isolation of my youth, the constant fear of persecution as I grew up, and even bits of my experience being ejected from Mimir as I discovered there was more to my physical defects than some hateful old spacer stories.

I was oversharing with a stranger, to say the least.

It didn't answer, or rather it already had told me what it could. Instead, it projected an image of me going back into my vessel. As far as it was concerned, I was in a place I wasn't meant to stay in for long.

Then it shared another thought that almost felt like words, like it was learning from how I spoke to it.

'I'll stay near until you can visit again.'