Tsosie was shaking his head at me before I gave up. I didn’t cut the connection. There was no reason to, and if somebody over on Afar woke up, made it to a com, and sent a signal we’d know immediately. Anyway, being a rescue vessel, we had the override codes for their drives. And now that Sally had formalized her link to him, she could start turning Afar in a more useful direction. For example, back toward Core Gen. This would take us away from Big Rock Candy Mountain, but we weren’t going back to her anyway, and other ships were inbound to continue her evacuation.
We wouldn’t want to brake Afar unless we had to. That v was useful, and if we had to dump it, it would take us a while to get it back.
But since we couldn’t raise him, I was going to have to go over there and make sure that the crew had what they needed to stay alive until we got them back to Core General. That meant I needed to don not just my standard hardsuit, but a heavy-duty, thermally protective suit that did not radiate any heat whatsoever. My goal was to avoid melting my hosts in addition to keeping myself from freezing into a curiously complex rock.
“Ceasing rotation,” Sally said. “We’re nearly in range for your jump.”
We weren’t accelerating anymore. As Sally’s rotation slowed, I felt myself drifting up against the acceleration couch straps.
“Sally.” I unbuckled and propelled myself toward the gangway down to Medical. “Line me up… oh, make it three cold-zone drones. The ones that are safe to use around methane breathers. And the cold-zone hardsuit.”
“The drones are still over there,” she said. “We’ll be matched in about six minutes.”
It wasn’t a very long gangway. A meter at most; more of a narrow spot to make space for storage lockers and a decompression door. My ayatana passengers flinched from the soft surfaces of the walls, the glow of the corridor lights. The squishy bodies of Loese and Tsosie.
I tried not to look at my own aching hands. Instead, I directed my attention toward the cold, clean white surfaces of the operating theater. It was the least revolting thing I could see, even though to the human side of my current blend of personalities it looked like a torture chamber. There’s a lot of plexiglass shielding it from the rest of Medical, because blood—or ichor, or whatever—splatter in microgravity or under maneuvers is nobody’s idea of a good time. And the operating frame has a lot of weird-looking restraints on it, because not everybody’s limbs are the same size, shape, or arranged in the same order.
I was studying it so closely that I almost missed Hhayazh waiting for me by the airlock. Hhayazh looked fine to Darboof sensibilities—black and jointed and hairy, alien, but at least not like a hagfish in trousers.
I was almost as offended by that image as I was amused.
I sailed up to it. It slapped the hardsuit core against the center of my chest, and the suit began unfolding itself around my body. I sighed in relief. The hardsuit didn’t look too bad to the Darboof part of my mind.
Hhayazh said, “Affix your appendages in whatever gesture your superstitions demand, and petition those supernatural beings to which your race subscribes.”
“I’m an atheist,” I retorted, while Sally’s servos, the suit’s own functions, and my exo assembled the hardsuit around me. “Faith is just your neurochemistry deluding you.”
“In that case, twist your siphon around and kiss your ass goodbye.”
It handed me my helmet.
“You should probably come up with a less physiologically unlikely blessing, Flight Nurse.”
“Then you might take me seriously.”
“You put ants in this, didn’t you?” I inspected the inside of the helmet. My voice echoed back from the inside.
“Ants?”
I could tell it was checking senso. This was confirmed when it went on, “Oh, a Terran insect. They’re very attractive, although the body design looks a little unsophisticated.”
“They bite,” I said, and put the helmet on.
Hhayazh made sure I was anchored to a grip, then thumped me on the shoulder of the hardsuit with its hairy, carapaced limb, something it never would have done if I’d been wearing just my uniform and exo. The spikes glanced off the hardsuit, though. It was really a very considerate bugbear from the deepest recesses of the human id. And carrying the ayatanas I was, I found its physical form less horrible than my own.
It lifted a spray nozzle from a hook on the wall, drew out loops of hose, and began to coat me with quick-dry insulating foam. We could peel it off when I got back to Sally, and between now and then it would cut down on those dangerous heat leaks—out and in.
I was going alone, because if I brought Tsosie or one of the others, we doubled the chance that a suit might leak warmth and fry our patients.
Hhayazh was meticulous. It made two passes before it was satisfied, and touched several places up. Then it stepped back, waved an IR scanner over me, and did a couple more spots again while I sighed and tried not to fidget. It was only doing its job, and if our roles had been reversed, I would have double-checked everything, too.
It doesn’t pay to be an asshole to people who are being careful to do their job well.
When it was finished, I thumped it back—gently, because between the hardsuit and my exo, I could have done it some damage—and stepped into the lock.
The inner door hissed shut behind me.
CHAPTER 6
I FLOATED, SUPPORTED BY THE HARDSUIT and my exo, hardly feeling any pain at all now that the acceleration had dropped off. You get so used to hurting that when it goes away not being in pain doesn’t even feel normal, exactly. It feels like having superpowers. I had so much energy and everything was so easy all of a sudden.
So weird to think that a lot of people have superpowers all the time and don’t even know it.
I’m not blind to the irony that I work at the best hospital in the universe, amid the most advanced medical technology of I-don’t-even-know-how-many systers and systems, and they can’t fix my pain syndrome. They can’t even figure out what is causing it, exactly.
I’m something of a medical mystery.
One part autoimmune, one part neurological, one part we aren’t sure. One hundred percent frustrating.
At least I’ve got the exo, and together my machine and I keep each other productive. I give it a purpose and it gives me function. We make a good team, and even though it’s just a prosthesis, I have a lot of affection for it.
And sometimes, like now, nothing hurt too much—and those times were amazing.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’m not actually all that eager for the Synarche to get around to installing the new artificial gravity everywhere. One of the reasons I came to space was to get away from being heavy and sore all the time. When we’re home at Core General, I’ve requisitioned quarters as close to the hub as possible, and I use the therapy tanks about every dia. They’re farther from where I work than would be optimal, but it’s worth it for the lower gs.
So floating in the airlock while it cycled wasn’t bad at all. Especially as I’d taken the anti-inflammatories earlier, and tuned my system to lessen pain. I had a little cushion between me and the universe.
The outer door irised, and I found myself face-to-face with infinity.
* * *
There was pain, but it wasn’t real. It was just the expectation that something would hurt and my system’s response to it as the borrowed personalities and memories in my fox flinched from sudden light. The expectation of an injury can hurt nearly as much as the injury itself. My human eyes could handle unfiltered starlight fine, without suffering radiation burns or dazzle. What I knew and what the ayatanas knew were different, and because the memories and expectations of three different Darboof colleagues were currently wired directly into my nervous system, sometimes their reflexes won. Their atmosphere was opaque to a lot of what my species considered visible light, so they weren’t any better adapted to enduring it than I was to gamma rays.
I—or my methanogen memory-passengers—had b
een braced in anticipation, so I got the wincing and blinking over quickly and reasserted control.
The universe was very beautiful. I looked out through the lock into the darkless night, and the hugeness of the galaxy took my breath away.
We flew abeam of Afar, a little in advance of him in order to avoid his coils, and his hull seemed to gather and scatter all the brilliant starlight. The ship was windowless and reflective in deference to the radiation sensitivity of his crew. He bore no markings that fell into my visual spectrum. I spotted the closest airlock anyway, or rather Sally picked it out for me in senso.
It wasn’t that bad a jump. Sally and Afar were functionally motionless—their speeds and trajectories matched—and I had my navigation jets, so even if I miscalculated slightly, I could do a burn and fix it. Not that Sally would ever let me miscalculate. Our artificially intelligent friends are good at math.
So, I aimed myself at SPV I Bring Tidings From Afar—and I launched.
My trajectory was good. I nailed the v, despite having to allow for both the mass and power of the hardsuit and the mass of my insulation—and I didn’t even have to use Sally’s calculations to do it. There’s no arc in space—okay, that’s not perfectly true, but you know what I mean—and it had taken me a while to get used to moving under these conditions. You aimed where you were going—or ahead of it, if the target was moving faster than you—and didn’t worry about gravity pulling you down.
Back in Judiciary, we used to razz each other mercilessly if we didn’t get our trajectory quite right and had to waste jets. I know some of my medical colleagues think I’m a hot dog because of that, but old habits—and points of pride—die hard. After twelve years in the military and nine at Core General, most of it spent jumping out of perfectly good starships, I had gotten pretty good at this.
I was sailing right at Afar’s front door when he slowly, erratically, began to roll away from me. The distance between us, which had been closing, began to open.
Afar’s EM drive did not produce a visible signature, so—like all Synarche vehicles that were not Judiciary ships—he was equipped with signal lights along the arc of his hull. They blazed now, pulsing through a spectrum of visible light and into the ultraviolet and infrared, so it looked to me as if ripples of rainbows and darkness were crawling in bright lines along his hull.
“Crap,” I said into my suit mike. “I need to catch him. Sally, can you—” Senso took my words straight to her, as if I had subvocalized.
Afar was a fast packet, a data hauler. Not much in the galaxy could outrun him, but Sally could keep up.
A Judiciary Interceptor could outrun Sally. The Freeport pirate types probably had ships that could. A few of them. Maybe.
I couldn’t, though, in my little hardsuit using reaction mass to move around. Not if Afar decided to really get his legs on. Or fold into white space, obviously.
Burn hard, Sally answered. I will not let you fall.
Hhayazh’s “voice” came through the senso, my first indication that the flight nurse was monitoring me. Hhayazh was one of the most conscientious sentients in the known galaxy. Ambulances are not for fuel efficiency. We’ve got you.
Is Afar supposed to be scooting away like that? Don’t you have control of those drives?
I do have control of the drives. Afar himself is still unresponsive, Sally said. The ship might be executing an automated debris avoidance routine? It doesn’t look like evasive maneuvers.
It didn’t look like evasive maneuvers. It was stately, and while he was accelerating, he wasn’t pulling away as fast as he might. I burned. Chasing a runaway starship in a hardsuit like a lunatic.
This one was going to get around the cafeterias.
My heart thudded against the back of my ribs. I could lie and say it was an unpleasant sensation, but the truth is, I love this sort of thing. If he gets much more v I can’t catch him!
I know, Llyn. There’s some weird code here. I need to route around it—
Don’t slow him down, I said. I’m already correcting.
—there. That should do the trick.
The iridescent warning lights faded away, and Afar stopped accelerating. With that taken care of, it was easy enough to correct for his maneuvers—even with my limited fuel and the limited power of my maneuvering jets. I decided not to waste fuel braking, and came in hot but under control. My boots made contact with Afar’s hull a little bit back of where I wanted to be, and a little bit ventral, but three running steps (clang, clang, clang) braked me, and brought me in line with the airlock that I’d been aiming for.
There was enough force in my contact that it put a little spin on Afar, but my electromagnets held me in place until he stabilized himself. Sally, do you think that was an attempt to ditch me?
Just reflexes, I think, she answered.
I was glad the Darboof used ferrous material in their construction. It wasn’t guaranteed, with some of the extremophile systers. What you thought of as a liquid and what you thought of as a metal were strongly influenced by the sort of environment you grew up in.
At least these folks agreed with my species that oxygen was not a rock. That was potentially something we had in common… though oxygen was a lot closer to rockhood where the Darboof came from. And sometimes it was snow.
I didn’t have to glance over my shoulder to feel Sally correcting her own position, resuming her post.
I covered the distance between my landing and the hatch in under a standard minute. Afar didn’t roll or yaw again. Maybe he wasn’t trying to shake me off.
It would have been scary if I’d missed Afar, but not tragic. I had decent maneuverability in the hardsuit. And if it came right down to it, Sally could have come and gotten me. As Hhayazh had mentioned, her requisitions didn’t stint on fuel.
So I couldn’t count what Afar had done as a murder attempt. Especially since we still had no evidence that the shipmind was aware, or even alive, in there.
A little reluctantly, I folded up my incipient grudge and popped it into my proverbial hip pocket for later contemplation. I knew I had a tendency to take things personally. As Sally had suggested, Afar’s sudden roll was almost certainly the result of him not being awake to cancel out some automated evasion routine.
I was not, I told myself firmly, about to break into an extremely exotic and dangerous environment, surrounded by a starship that was trying to kill me.
* * *
Having reached Afar’s forward airlock, I passed inside. The lock functioned perfectly well once I entered the rescue overrides, which was almost a disappointment. I’d sort of been looking forward to the challenge of breaking in if Afar’s recalcitrance had continued.
Well, Sally had already gotten her drones inside.
They were waiting for me as I paused inside the interior door. My hardsuit was armor, and it—like the external hull of SMV I Race To Seek the Living—was liberally marked with the Caduceus, the Healing Leaf, the Blade of Life, the Red Crescent, the White Shell, the White Star, and every other galactic symbol of healing and nonviolent assistance recognized by the syster species of the Synarche. Optimized for recognition in diverse visual spectra.
It made for a busy presentation, but better safe than sorry. Most sentients would manage to find something blazoned on my chest that looked like help if they took the time to squint closely enough.
Now it was all blurred behind insulating foam.
Oops.
Well, I had already looked like an alien monster.
Speaking of visual spectra, when I peered through the interior airlock door, I couldn’t see a damned thing. It was dark as the proverbial Well in here. That opaque-to-visual-spectrum atmosphere I mentioned was apparently present and accounted for.
The expectations of my alien memories, that I would be able to see, made me briefly terrified that I’d been struck blind. I resisted the urge to turn on my floods—it was all deadly radiation to the methanogens, and I didn’t want to cook them by looking at them. Sally wa
s already adjusting the suit to pick up and relay Afar’s interior “lighting,” anyway, with overlays both in senso and on the inside of my faceplate. In moments, I had a good look into a receiving area, currently empty of people and cargo and much of anything else.
The distress caused by the alien ayatanas eased up once I could see. I was still trapped in a monstrous body, hot and squishy and viscerally revolting. (Actually, the viscera were a big part of the problem. They really didn’t bear too much thinking about, as far as my methanogen passengers were concerned.) But at least my passenger memories now found our surroundings comfortable to look at, even if I was isolated from them by a layer of armor.
I felt as ridiculous as if I were taking a bath while wearing an armored personnel carrier.
I knew better than to complain. However good we’ve gotten at treating psychological and neurological illnesses, hospitals—even Core General—have an ethos of getting the job done despite personal frailty or personal feelings that, on its whole, I feel is a good thing. It does mean you don’t want to get tagged as a wuss, though, or a complainer, or somebody who doesn’t pull her weight.
Fortunately, Sally had set the overrides on my hardsuit without my having to ask, so I was relieved of the temptation to peel it off and get out in the balmy negative 170 degrees Celsius. I would have frozen solid as soon as I popped a suit latch, and the incandescent outgassing of my pleasantly room-temperature atmosphere would boil the ice-crystal builders of this ship alive.
I wouldn’t have done anything so foolish. Even ridden by my guest ayatanas, I was the one in control—whatever you might have seen on your late-night three-vee. Reality is seldom as melodramatic as entertainment. On the other hand, reality is much more random, arbitrary, and dangerous than fiction, and it’s my job to understand that to exact tolerances. Feeling like you’re the protagonist of your own story doesn’t guarantee you’re going to make it to the final act of anybody else’s.
I wouldn’t have done anything foolish. But it was kind of Sally to take the distraction of temptation away. You’ve only got so much executive function, and it wouldn’t hurt to have all of it to process whatever life-or-death situation I was about to find myself in.
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