Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1) - Ann Leckie Page 0,91
and maintained myself. Still, I found myself worrying that something would go wrong. At least it was better than thinking about fighting my own officers. Or the heat shield’s failing.
I fastened my helmet. My breath hissed loud in my ears. Faster than it should have. I forced myself to slow my breathing, deepen it. Hyperventilating wouldn’t help. I had to move quickly, but not so hastily that I made some fatally foolish mistake.
Waiting for the airlock to cycle, I felt my aloneness like an impenetrable wall pressing around me. Usually one body’s off-kilter emotion was a minor, easily dismissable thing. Now it was only this one body, nothing beyond to temper my distress. The rest of me was here, all around, but inaccessible. Soon, if things went right, I wouldn’t even be near my self, or have any idea when I might rejoin it. And at this moment I could do nothing but wait. And remember the feel of the gun in One Var’s hand—my hand. I was One Esk, but what was the difference? The recoil as One Var shot Lieutenant Awn. The guilt and helpless anger that had overwhelmed me had receded at that moment, overcome by more urgent necessity, but now I had time to remember. My next three breaths were ragged and sobbing. For a moment I was perversely glad I was hidden from myself.
I had to calm myself. Had to clear my mind. I thought of songs I knew. My heart is a fish, I thought, but when I opened my mouth to sing it, my throat closed. I swallowed. Breathed. Thought of another one.
Oh, have you gone to the battlefield
Armored and well armed?
And shall dreadful events
Force you to drop your weapons?
The outer door opened. If Mianaai had not used her device, officers on duty would have seen that the lock had opened, would have notified Captain Rubran, drawing Mianaai’s attention. But she had used it, and she had no way of knowing what I did. I reached around the doorway for a handhold and pulled myself out.
Looking at the inside of a gateway often made humans queasy. It had never bothered me before, but now I was nothing but a single human body I found it did the same to me. Black, but a black that seemed simultaneously an unthinkable depth into which I might fall, was falling, and a suffocating closeness ready to press me into nonexistence.
I forced myself to look away. Here, outside, there was no floor, no gravity generator to keep me in place and give me an up and down. I moved from one handhold to the next. What was happening behind me, inside the ship that was no longer my body?
It took seventeen minutes to reach a shuttle, operate its emergency hatch, and perform a manual undock. At first I fought the desire to halt, to look behind me, to listen for the sounds of someone coming to stop me, never mind I couldn’t have heard anything outside my own helmet. Just maintenance, I told myself. Just maintenance outside the hull. You’ve done it hundreds of times.
If anyone came I could do nothing. Esk would have failed—I would have failed. And my time was limited. I might not be stopped, and still fail. I could not think of any of that.
When the moment came, I was ready and away. My view was limited to fore and aft, the only two hardwired cameras on the shuttle. As Justice of Toren receded in the aft view, the rising sense of panic that I had mostly held in check till now overtook me. What was I doing? Where was I going? What could I possibly accomplish alone and single-bodied, deaf and blind and cut off? What could be the point of defying Anaander Mianaai, who had made me, who owned me, who was unutterably more powerful than I would ever be?
I breathed. I would return to the Radch. I would eventually return to Justice of Toren, even if only for the last moments of my life. My blindness and deafness were irrelevant. There was only the task before me. There was nothing to do but sit in the pilot’s chair and watch Justice of Toren get smaller, and farther away. Think of another song.
According to the chronometer, if I had done everything exactly as I should, Justice of Toren would disappear from my screen in four minutes and thirty-two seconds. I watched, counting, trying not to think of anything else.