Chapter 17

In response, Ravenna reared up on her hind legs and then lunged forward, smacking the right side of her face full-on against one of the protruding lumps in the wall, about a meter from the buggy light. The black material lit up with a circuit grid pattern, radiating out from the spot where the Koolie's cheek pressed against what Pit now realized was a sensor.

She flashed her teeth at him in a feral grin, and he felt his lips curl to return the wry snarl. "Interfacing is easy," she said through chattering teeth. Then she glanced forcefully towards the sensor beyond the bug light.

Pit's smile faded. His toes grew cold at the idea of connecting his brain directly to the ship's buggy computer, both his human and dog minds rebelling against the idea. Bile threatened to rise into his throat and overcome him. "But-which side of my-" he started to ask, but realized his HUD had already supplied him the answer: the left side; more specifically, the hinge of his jaw.

Gulping down his terror, he propelled himself against the sensor, stepping on his right ear in the process. Still, he managed to make contact, and he knew immediately when he and Certainty connected. It was as if he knew the ship. He could visualize every wire, every tube and every crack in her hull. He trembled, the force of his shaking making his teeth rattle together.

A thought that was distinctly Ravenna-shaped entered his head. The bug is fighting back. We would not usually shake like this.

He shot back a thought without considering how to form it. It wasn't composed of words, but of canine viciousness, things he might do to a rat or a raccoon. He felt Ravenna's presence in the three-way flow of information recoil with a mix of revulsion and consensus, and he tried to form a more civilized sentence for her. How can we kill it?

Tell Certainty what you want, Ravenna transferred back. Make her understand exactly what she needs to get rid of, in every possible way you can describe it to her.

Pit withdrew from the flood of information, his segmented brain compartmentalizing without issue. He called up the logs he'd been analyzing right after the bug attacked him and bundled them into a single impression, which he carefully fed to Certainty.

He had to admit to himself that he'd never imagined such a strange way to interface with a computer, and he'd certainly had no idea that daugments could do such a thing. Maybe it was only the human transplants. That would put him and Ravenna in a very elite club.

He snapped back to the present as Ravenna thought-yelled at him, Pit, hold your ground!

There was something buzzing at the edges of Pit's awareness, which was still largely informed by Certainty's presence and self-understanding. He realized that it was the bug, gritty and ferocious, trying to burrow through the boundary of wills that he and Ravenna and the ship were pressing in on it.

They stood there and held their ground against the bad code for almost an hour, carefully coordinating their inches forward so that the bug's virtual cage tightened ever so slowly.

It was satisfying to control a force field with his mind, but Pit still felt a twinge of pity for the bug. It was just doing what it thought it was programmed to do, or maybe what it had been programmed to do, and here they were, giddy as they ganged up on it to squash it.

As the bug got caught in its own destructive crossfire attempting to loop around and escape from the tiny space they'd trapped it in, it left a distinct splatting impression on Pit's mind. Bzzt.

The sensor stopped shaking his jaw, and he was so stiff from holding himself in place that he staggered when there was nothing to resist anymore. The break from Certainty and her flow of information was jarring, a silence roaring in to fill his headspace. Rolling his head on a very stiff neck, he watched Ravenna step more gracefully away from her sensor and snap her teeth through the ruffled fur on her shoulder.

"That was something," Pit said, wanting to fill the silence that had fallen between them. He was strangely lonely without the presence of the computer and the other daugment, fleeting as the connection had been. He nosed his ribs, annoyed with himself. Must be a side effect of interfacing.

"That was certainly not unimpressive," Ravenna replied. "The idea to trap the bug between multiple wills had not previously occurred to me, for perhaps obvious reasons. A good show. At last that bane of my existence is gone. And now I am exhausted and very thirsty."

She whirled without another word and bounded off the way he'd come. Pit scrambled to follow her, tracking her scent through the hallways that were still unfamiliar and almost menacing.

He found her in the hold, nosing at something right outside her box, head down between her front paws, tail in the air. She was a sharp contrast to the Koolie he'd faced down earlier that day, with her eyes full of self-righteous fire.

Pit's tailtip wriggled. He snapped it decisively to the floor. "No," he whispered to his tail before raising his voice to ask her, "Can I have some water too?"

Ravenna raised her dripping muzzle. "Of course. My apologies, I'm usually better about hospitality. It's been a stressful week."

She crossed in the faint blue light cast by gentle overhead running lights, her white patches bright and ghost-soft. Vanishing behind a crate, she returned nosing a bowl of water. "Here. It will refill automatically. I put a soup stone in it, so it releases just a touch of broth, for extra nourishment. Flying in a ship's hold triggers the loss of approximately seventeen percent more nutrients from your food intake.

"It's a fact," she said with some embarrassment as he kept looking at her.

He couldn't help it. She was reminding him fiercely of someone, but he couldn't put his finger on who it was. He just kept staring, hoping he'd spot the detail that triggered his memory or association.

It didn't take Ravenna long to fidget beneath his scrutiny. "I'm sorry. You will have to excuse me. I'm very tired. Thank you for helping me kill the bug."

Pit shrugged self-consciously. Now he wished he could just plunge his face in the water bowl and guzzle. "I just happened to be there. You would have figured it out."

"Usually, yes," Ravenna said, granting him a wry smile. "'Better alone and unwanted than desired in the company of fools.' It's the way I work best."

Pit's ears pricked up. That was a quote from isolationist literature-Asai Helmund's Ichor of Solitude, he was pretty sure. A treatise on the holiness of the introverted life. One of his favorites.

Perhaps he had misjudged his fellow daugment after all.

A weird little hope birthed in his heart. He quashed it immediately, but couldn't stop thinking about its implications.

Ravenna must have seen the change in his expression, because she skittered into her box, clearly spooked. "Later, Pit," she said in a voice so quiet he strained to hear it. The Koolie tugged the door closed behind her with her teeth and lay down with her chin between her front paws.

Pit stretched his neck towards the bowl. He caught an edge and tugged it forward, sloshing a little over the side but bringing it to within reach of his box. Then he buried his muzzle and sucked up enough water to quench his thirst. Ravenna was right, it did have a salty-savory-brothy aftertaste, and his canine taste buds enjoyed that.

Before he went into the box to sleep again-gods, I am sleeping far too much these days, he chided himself-he glanced over at Ravenna.

She still lay with her muzzle on her paws, her eyes turned up to the running lights, gold glittering with chips of blue. She looked so sad that Pit felt a howl rise in his throat. He held it in.

He lay down and closed his eyes, dreaming almost instantly, though not of bugs. He dreamed with his body first, dreaming of rushing after a mouse and pinning it in one of the closets, howling and howling; then he dreamed with his mind, dreaming of striding across the surface of Prowess, breathing the perfect blend of oxygen and other gasses he'd designed for his body's chemistry.

And late in the morning, he dreamed with both his mind and his body: dreaming of running, running, across a field of his very own.