Could the ship subvert its ventilation system and either starve her of oxygen or else give her so much she grew giddy? (No.) Could a servitor get close enough not to touch but to administer a drug dart? (Also no.)

As question after question came, nothing availed.

Only one person asked nothing of the ship. Instead, Atlanta tried talking to herself, sitting in the corner with her arms crossed, eyes closed.

She was in her own personal virtual space, the one that she never shared with anyone, and was talking with the three advisors she had created long ago, according to the way she had been taught. Her advisors were trained in court etiquette and Paxian history, the semiotics of fashion, food, and other upper-class symbology, the valuation of jewelry and liquor, and a thousand other matters entirely useless when shoved onto a bioship headed toward a pirate haven. Still, maybe they could have some scrap of wisdom that would be helpful.

Being able to have your own PriVS, private virtual space, was something that required biomechanisms installed in your brain, and while you could have them added as an adult, the truth was that those who had them from an early age became adept in their use in a way that others could not—true for her human race, at least; some aliens functioned differently.

They stood in a chamber with round walls tiled in shimmering blue and scarlet and green, overlooking a stormy sea, its violence contained under the glass. There were no other furnishings. Underfoot was a surface of translucent, pliable material, clear like glass but rubbery in texture. On one wall hung the Paxian Imperial Seal, an immense version of it that managed to be larger than the room’s dimensions, so when you looked at it, it was all you could see.

Atlanta had chosen the storm held behind the glass deliberately rather than using something spun up from her subconscious the way some of her peers did, claiming they were more “authentic” that way. Why bother, if you never took the time to figure out why your subconscious had picked that? Like the seal, it was a symbol to remind herself of the responsibilities impressed on her over and over again since she had been chosen from among the noble youth to serve as the heir to the Empress at the age of twelve: it was a position that carried with it a constant threat of violence, of assassination, of political coup. All of which had happened over the centuries in space.

These were her advisors:

Herself at six, dressed in grubby clothes, twigs in her hair, scratches on her hands from climbing trees. That was how she cloaked her strategic, savage, ruthless side and reminded herself that it could lurk in many forms.