And I wasn’t good for anything at all while it was happening.
I stayed there, frozen in a crouch, while Sally poured herself through the electronic portions of my psyche like… I can’t even think of a metaphor. It was a good thing I was under gravity, because if I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to keep myself from drifting off into space and bumping things randomly. If I concentrated really hard, I could force my eyes to focus. That was it. That was all I was good for. But after a second or two I’d have to refocus them, because I was slumping ever so slowly toward the deck.
And whatever was going on between Sally and Helen—or Sally and the machine—was happening on the other side of me, and far too fast for my conscious mind to maintain any awareness of.
“Llyn,” Tsosie said, “I really think that we should leave.”
As if I could, I thought at him fiercely, wondering if I’d even managed to subvocalize.
“There’s more bots massing outside the airlock, Llyn! A lot more! I don’t know if she’s making them or just packing the vicinity. But if I had to guess I’d say she was getting ready to rush you.”
Well, that was comforting. Wait, had Tsosie gone back out through the airlock while I was distracted? I hadn’t told him to do that.
I hadn’t told him not to, either. And checking our six wasn’t a bad idea. At least he hadn’t taken off and left me here.
That’s unfair to Tsosie, I told myself. I guess I was feeling pretty vulnerable and maybe even scared, locked down in my body like that with nowhere to go and no control.
After half a million ans, give or take, I found I could tell if I was breathing again. I had been; it was a relief to be certain. Sally?
I’m in. I just need enough bandwidth to communicate with myself, now.
“Great,” I muttered. “I was thinking about switching careers. I can be a corpus callosum.”
Something like a giant fist thundered against the exterior airlock door. I couldn’t hear it, but I felt it through the deck. I managed to turn my head. Tsosie was not in the airlock. Helen had gone back there.
The door dented, but didn’t break. It seemed unlikely that I was getting back out that way.
The outer wall of the cargo bay was nothing but hull, though. There had to be an airlock in it. In addition to whatever massive doors had been built to move bulk cargo in and out under freefall conditions.
Jens! Tsosie yelled in my head. Evacuate!
“Just a sec.” I bent down to get my sensors closer to the connection between the coffin and the bulkhead. If the chambers had been built into the ship, I wasn’t sure what we could do to move them. Cutting lasers, maybe.
That would pose no risk to the occupants at all.
I wanted to know before I left what kind of preparation we needed to make before we came back. And I was definitely leaving.
My plan seemed pretty good to me, honestly. Until the hull plates under my feet began to crumble.
* * *
Well, that explained where the extra bots had come from. Helen had been autocannibalizing her own hull to build them, and she’d finally autocannibalized too far. I had a certain amount of time to contemplate it, as I fell through the shredding fabric of that hull in slow motion, surrounded by the cryo coffins that had been closest to me. I was still plugged into the access port on the nearest one.
I wasn’t too worried. There was a long way to fall, and while Big Rock Candy Mountain was moving fast, she wasn’t accelerating fast. There was too much of her, and her design wasn’t built to take a lot of torque. I had maneuvering jets.
And I had Sally.
I pinwheeled, without much control. I needed to wait for the correct attitude before I hit my jets to stabilize and keep catching up. But I could set the suit to do that on its own. Its automated reflexes were a hell of a lot better than mine. I’d just jet myself right over and start collecting cryo units until Sally could come and get me.
I kept thinking that right up until I got myself stabilized and got a glimpse back inside the cargo bay. I didn’t see Helen or Tsosie inside.
But a tentacle of microbots was stretching toward me.
I yelped—out loud, knowing Sally and possibly Tsosie could hear me. And anybody back on the ambulance who was listening to our coms, which was probably everybody.
I hit my jets on manual, ducking away. Until I hit the end of the connector cable, at which point the cryo chamber and I began to revolve around one another.
It was a rookie mistake, and the kind of error that ended with frozen astronauts falling endlessly in orbit. Or at least until somebody came and collected their corpse, since it was antisocial to leave space junk spinning around out there where somebody else might run into it.
So on some level I should have been grateful that the tendril compensated for my maneuver, and snatched me effortlessly out of space. The cryo units were starting to fall behind—Big Rock Candy Mountain slowly gaining v over them—and I squeaked in frustration as I was pulled away. An unprofessional manifestation of a very professional anger. There were people in there.
If I could get them to Core General, they might be people we could save. But as we accelerated away from them, all I could see was their batteries failing, along with any chance at life for the people inside. Helen apparently had no control over Big Rock Candy Mountain’s engines, which had been accelerating for centians and were expected to accelerate for centians more.
It occurred to me that the microbots could crack my hardsuit, or whip me around until my vertebrae separated, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to prevent it. A little bit of worry on my own behalf penetrated my professional despair.
“There you are!” Sally cried brightly. The rush of relief that flooded through me was so intense I had to dial it back a little. “You’re all right!”
“Not for much longer!” I yelled, shoving uselessly at the microbots.
Sally said, “Cut that out! It worked. But don’t you ever scare me like that again.”
I blinked several times before it occurred to me that I should ask her what she meant. “Excuse me?”
“Punching through the hull. Helen couldn’t let lives be at risk. You distracted her—and the machine—long enough for me to override them.”
“Oh.” I decided not to explain that I hadn’t punched through the hull on purpose. “Oh! Is that you towing me in?”
“It doesn’t mean I won’t squeeze you a bit,” she threatened.
“How are Helen and the machine?”
“I don’t think I harmed them,” Sally said. “Just subdued.”
I craned my head around. I couldn’t twist that far and had to rely on senso for a visual of the cryo units. “What about those people out there?”
“Helen’s going to be pretty happy with us once we rescue them,” Tsosie said. “I’m fine, too, thanks for asking.”
He knew—and he knew I knew—that I would have felt it through our link if anything had actually happened to him. But if Tsosie ever stopped busting my ass, it would mean that he was being controlled by brainworms.
“Well,” I said. “So am I. Can I go fetch those cryo units?”
“I’m coming,” Sally said. “I’ll save you a step.”
Tsosie cleared his throat. “You know. It is possible to be too cool under pressure.”
I ignored him. “Sally, we’re going to have to divert power from our own cryo tanks to support these.”
We had three. We used them when somebody was wounded beyond what we could repair in the field, and too badly to survive the flight back to Core General.
“Well,” Sally said in resignation, “nobody had better get sick on the way home.”
CHAPTER 4
WE COULD HAVE GONE DIRECTLY on to the docked Synarche ship, but it would have been dumb. Sally was sending drones to investigate, and we could deal with it after a rest cycle. Tsosie and I were both exhausted and low on resources, and I was in too much pain to be much good to anybody
.
One thing about the kind of pain I have is that it is so amorphous—so unlocalized—that it’s hard to describe and easy to ignore. You don’t even necessarily notice that it hurts, when it hurts. You just notice that you’re crabby and out of sorts and everything seems harder than it should.
Not being able to describe it also tends to make other people take it less seriously. Like family members, and sometimes doctors, too.
I found myself trying to massage my hands through the hardsuit as we cruised back to Sally, using our thrusters to match velocity and then, when she seemed motionless, to nudge us into contact with her hull.
Since we weren’t jumping out of her at a moving target at this time, we both entered through the same airlock at the same time. We waited through the decon and, when the lock cycled, stepped inside.
Loese, the pilot, wasn’t waiting for us, because she was on a rest shift and Sally gets very cross with us if we ditch our rest for nonessential reasons—or, as she calls them, “excuses.” The rest of the crew all found reasons to wander by and greet us as we were stripping out of our newly sterilized hardsuits. It wasn’t exactly a hero’s welcome, but it was nice to see everybody.
Not that Sally was so big we could have avoided them even if we were trying.
The first to wander around the ring was Hhayazh. It was one of our flight nurses, a multi-limbed multi-eyed nightmare creature from Ykazh, its dull black exoskeleton covered in thick, bristling hairs. It was also one of the nicest sentients you’d ever care to meet, once you embraced Ykazhian culture… which, in turn, embraced sarcasm with the enthusiasm of an octopus embracing a tasty, tasty mollusk.
“Greetings, far wanderers,” it said, through the usual translation protocols. “I perceive you’ve made it back to the real hub of the action. I hope your trip wasn’t too boring.”
“About as boring as being here,” Tsosie answered. “We heard you broke the place.”
“That wasn’t me,” Hhayazh said. It pointed at Camphvis, the other flight nurse, as the Banititlan came into the cabin. As she always did, she was leading with her eyestalks. “Camphvis leaned on the dashboard.”
Camphvis responded with the bubbling sound that her species used to indicate derisive laughter—which the senso translated into derisive laughter. This produced an interesting layering effect. “Where does Sally keep her dashboard?”
“If you knew that you wouldn’t have pushed the wrong buttons.” Hhayazh rattled its exoskeleton, a sound like the hollow carved windchimes people on my homeworld made out of native plant cellulose. It was a social cue with all sorts of meanings, like human facial expressions, and I hadn’t even begun sorting them out.
“What actually happened?” I asked.
“Equipment malfunction,” Sally said. “I’ll show you later.”
When Camphvis emerged completely around the hatchway, I saw that she was carrying a tray. Nothing complicated, just the hot, calorie-dense nutritive broth that spacers called “soup.” It wasn’t soup, but was profoundly welcome nonetheless.
Tsosie picked his up at once. I was still fighting with my hardsuit. They were supposed to peel themselves back into the actuator, but exposure to grit or something was causing it to hang up on my exo.
“Seriously.” I pretzeled myself into another awkward position. “What went wrong?”
Hhayazh, with surgical expertise, got the jammed bit unhooked and snatched its manipulators out of the way as the thing clam-shelled shut with a snap. “Go to bed,” it said. “You can ask questions when you’re not too tired to understand the answers.”
I traded Camphvis my actuator for a cup of soup. Her eyestalks twitched to focus on it. I was totally creating a distraction, because I was still working on my comeback to Hhayazh. Our Nazzish flight surgeon, Dr. Rhym, saved me from humiliation by climbing down the ladder from Sally’s hub into the gravity of the rim. (If you’re bantering and it takes you more than fifteen seconds to return a serve, you definitely lost.)
Rhym resembled a feathery tree stump, but moved with surprising agility. The long woodsy toes on their four feet wrapped the rungs in a prehensile fashion, leaving the manipulatory tendrils on what a human would have considered a face to gesticulate. They seemed as if they were talking to Sally privately: it wasn’t translated for the rest of us, and the wriggling stopped when they reached the deck.
I was bent over, working my swollen feet out of my boots. They should have retracted with the rest of the hardsuit. They hadn’t, and were stiff and not shaped for easy removal. The pressure hurt, and pushing against them to try to escape the pressure hurt.
“I’ll make sure this gets serviced,” Camphvis said, eyeballing the actuator suspiciously.
“Just take it apart and reprint it,” Hhayazh said.
Dr. Rhym was about my height in my current crouched position.
“Our patient-guests are stowed, and the peripheral has been brought aboard!” Even their translated voice sounded enthusiastic. “Dr. Jens, would you like some assistance?”
“Well, yes,” I proclaimed, and straightened up to hold on to the rungs on the opposite wall while Rhym scooted over to me.
They moved fast, each leg working independently of the others in a kind of scuttle or zoom. In moments, their manipulatory tendrils uncoiled and eased inside the left boot, gently prying it loose from my exo, which had gotten snagged on the lining. I sighed in relief as the thing came off.
Rhym is a very good surgeon. What I’d been struggling with for minutes they accomplished in instants. And they didn’t even use a knife.
* * *
I went to lie down.
It was my exo moving me at that point as much as me moving it, and I could kid myself that I picked up annoyance and worry through our link. I told myself that I was anthropomorphizing, but people used to assign personalities to ships and houses long before ships and houses had them, and there was a semi-AI processing engine in my exo. A small, uncomplicated one, without curiosity or an artificial personality. There wasn’t much room in there, and anyway can you imagine how terrible it would be for a person with agency to be stuck going through life as an assistive device?
Usually, before I went to bed, I’d tune down my pain management and see how my body was doing on the other side of the fuzzy wall of endorphins and interventions. This time, I didn’t: I knew what the answer was going to be.
I lay down on a patient bed in one of Sally’s two care units. This was not the usual bunk assigned to humans. We hot-swapped, and I traded off with Loese and Tsosie. But Tsosie was as tired as I was, and Loese wasn’t off her rest shift yet. I wouldn’t fit in Rhym’s bunk, Camphvis used gel blankets to keep her membranous skin moist, and Hhayazh’s species weren’t sleepers. So I got a bed big enough for a Thunderby, and even if it was a little hard, I didn’t complain—just printed off as many sterile blankets as we had consumables for and made a nest on top. I’d recycle the molecules later.
Then I plugged my exo in to charge, piped into it, and started checking up on my aching body to see if any of it was anything serious, or merely the usual combination of inflammation and polyarthralgia, before I dialed them down or, where I could manage it, turned them off.
My exo, predictably, had a little lecture waiting for me. Todia’s exertions have exceeded this unit’s filtering capabilities. Recommend extended rest, and a maintenance cycle.
“I can’t do the extended rest right now, kid. Put me in for eight hours and authorize the maintenance cycle.”
Lack of adequate rest will likely lead to worsening discomfort and is against medical advice.
“So is everything fun.”
This unit does not understand the response.
I sighed. “Acknowledged, patient’s decision is against medical advice.” Patient is a damn internist herself, robot. Also, I could get plenty of sleep on the trip home. Right now, we still had a second space ship to recon.
And yelling at my exo wouldn’t help. I turned both the room lights and my
pain response down. Nothing was busted: it was all just inflamed. Life is like that. I reached into senso to pull up a paper on Adrychrym circulatory systems. It was a boring paper: I meant to read myself to sleep. If I could get all the noisy doctors in my head to concentrate on medicine, they wouldn’t keep me awake.
I should have unloaded the ayatanas, I know. But I was too tired, and I was going to need them again tomorrow.
I was pushing my way through a badly written extract when I was interrupted by the small throat-clearing beep our shipmind uses when she’s about to enter a conversation and doesn’t want to startle anybody.
“Llyn, go to sleep,” Sally said. “Or I will make you.”
“I was sleeping,” I said.
“You were reading.”
“I was reading myself to—oh, never mind.” I’d wake up groggy if I used my fox to send myself to sleep, but it wasn’t worth fighting with the shipmind over. I tuned up the relevant hormones, and was gone before I had to listen to her rejoinder.
* * *
Tsosie was right: we did get a lot more popular with Helen once we retrieved her people from the bottomless waste of space. She wasn’t as happy when Sally immediately put them into her own storage rather than bringing them back to Big Rock Candy Mountain, or so Sally told us after our rest cycle.
Helen didn’t say anything about it to Tsosie or me—or the rest of the crew—because Sally kept her out of our way. The peripheral sat quietly in a corner of the ambulance, cabled to a bulkhead, sharing Sally’s sensorium. It’s always hazardous to assign human emotions to nonhuman sentiences, but Helen was modeled on a human psyche. And it seemed to me that her body language became less and less reactive and more composed as more and more of her people were moved on board Sally. And the more Sally let her experience the natural environment of space the same way Sally did.
I was sure she still wasn’t happy. Nor would I be, in her place, with most of my crew left behind. Nor was I, standing in my own shoes, with so many people left unrescued.
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