Dr. Rilriltok, having nearly been squashed once, had not pursued. Instead, it had summoned Judiciary and gotten Cheeirilaq—who spoke a dialect of the same language, so they didn’t need a translator to communicate. Cheeirilaq had used Judiciary channels to summon O’Mara, and then it had decamped to find me.
We didn’t know where Jones had gone or what she planned to do when she got there. We had no idea how to find her, with Linden and all of the hospital’s internal sensors down. But we—Cheeirilaq, O’Mara, and I—were the retrieval team now. Find her, we must.
This was going to be wonderful.
I looked up from attaching the second backup battery to my hardsuit, about to signal my readiness, and realized that Master Chief Dwayne Carlos was standing beside me. In his heavily accented, archaic Spanglish, he said, “I’m coming with you.”
I still had enough English to be able to work out what he meant. The weird thing was that when I reached for that knowledge, the ayatanas I was wearing all tried to offer up bits of their languages, and my first attempt to speak came out a bubbling croak.
I cleared my throat and tried again. “Carlos—”
He held up his hand and said something that I didn’t follow at all. “Wait,” I said in English. I held out a hand to Cheeirilaq, who laid another Judicial hardsuit actuator on it. I put it against his chest—gently, so as not to send him drifting off—and pushed the button. A moment later, and the suit whicked itself into existence around him, faceplate up.
“Try now,” I said.
He touched his ear. “Translation? Good. My shipmate has vanished, hasn’t she? Who else is going to be able to talk to her?”
I let the breath I had been going to use for arguing out through my nose, and tried again with a fresh one. “You’re in no shape—”
“Neither are you,” he retorted. “Next excuse?”
I hadn’t realized before that he was a pretty big human, as humans went. Even wasted and cryoburned and floating awkwardly above the deck in a hardsuit over striped pajamas, he made me feel small.
“I know you want to look out for your friend—”
Carlos shook his head. It set him drifting. I held out a hand for him to steady himself against. “It’s not that. I don’t know her. But how is she going to understand anything you say to her without…” He pointed vaguely at his ear.
The worried pinch of his mouth made me think there might be more. “What? Carlos, please—”
The next words came out of him as if wrenched. “What if nobody else from my time makes it?”
I thought about pointing out that we weren’t even entirely sure that Jones was from his time. She’d been the one in the anomalous cryo chamber, after all—
O’Mara shifted impatiently. Time was wasting.
I said, “There were ten thousand people on your ship. Some will live. Many will. You should rest so that you can help the others. You’re my patient, and in order for me to care for you, you need to stay here.”
“I can’t!” he exploded, unrightminded emotion breaking through. “Just let me come. Please.”
Friend Jens, Cheeirilaq said in my ear. We don’t have time to argue.
I looked at Master Chief Carlos. “If you get killed before they manage to pick your brain clean, the historians are never going to forgive me.”
I reached up, and sealed his helmet down.
* * *
We moved.
The immediate crisis of weightlessness and scattered power outages was coming under control. It still provoked a complicated spiral of nostalgia and alienation in me to zip past injured people and send medical staffers dodging out of the way as we shouted, “Gangway!”
I wasn’t this anymore. I was a doctor. I rescued people; I didn’t arrest them.
Well, I had already rescued this one. Maybe it was time to arrest her.
Carlos tripped a bit at first, but rapidly got control of his suit and kept up better than I would have expected. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug, and he probably had worn mag boots before. It helped that we weren’t moving as fast as Cheeirilaq and I had on the way in. In the absence of internal sensors or a way to track the fugitive through her fox, we had to stop and ask directions a lot. Fortunately, unit coordinators don’t handle direct patient care, and they tend to notice everything.
In particular, a barefoot Terran in hospital jammies swimming down their corridors after the gravity cuts out. We were fortunate that the emergency lighting had been brought online almost everywhere that needed it by now. I winced to think of trying to track Jones through the hospital in the dark.
Cheeirilaq and O’Mara were in the first row as we went. Now that he’d gotten the hang of the new suit, Carlos was pretty good in zero g. Propelling himself alongside me, he took the opportunity to ask, “Hey, Jens. You’re from Terra?”
“Never been,” I admitted, glancing down a side corridor.
“So how come you have an Earth name?”
“Pardon?”
“Brookllyn,” he said. “That’s as old Earth as it gets.”
“Boring parents.” Was everybody going to ask me that? My hardsuit clicked when I shrugged. “Hey, there’s an open storage locker down here.”
Nobody on staff would leave a locker open, even in a crisis. Especially in a crisis, when things might come sailing out and whack some unsuspecting sapient on the head. Or head-equivalent. You’d think somebody from an older and even more fragile habitation would be a little more careful.
Cheeirilaq turned, a little faster than O’Mara. For such a massy person, though, O’Mara was quick to orient. They said, “Good eye, Jens.”
I was in front now. The others followed me to the locker. It had been pillaged, and from the empty equipment hooks it looked like what had been taken was a humanoid ox-based hardsuit and some basic tools—a laser cutter/welder, and a good old-fashioned wrecking bar.
Stuff you could use to get through a closed pressure door, I thought, but didn’t say anything.
I looked at O’Mara, though, and they nodded. “Hope she doesn’t pop a hatch to something that uses sulfuric acid for blood.”
Incongruously, Cheeirilaq nodded, too.
I stared at it. That was the second weirdly human gesture.
Cheeirilaq started moving again. Over its shoulder, it said, I’m wearing a human ayatana. Your thoughts are as squishy as the rest of you.
“Well.” Banter was a good means of easing tension. I knew from Rilriltok that it thought so, too. Apparently it wasn’t the only member of its species to hold such an opinion. “If we had any logic in us, we wouldn’t have nearly wiped our own species out in the Before, when we didn’t have rightminding.”
We eat our mates if we can catch them. Everybody’s got some evolutionary baggage that winds up maladaptive in a sophont setting.
“Valuable protein resource.” I shrugged. “And it’s not as if your species is designed for coparenting.”
Protein is not so difficult to obtain these diar that it’s worth depriving the galaxy of an astrophysicist or a poet in order to eke out a few more eggs.
I realized Carlos was looking at us with horror. Joking, I mouthed through my faceplate.
I wasn’t sure if he believed me. Cheeirilaq wasn’t exactly exaggerating all that much: humans are not the only syster in the galaxy that benefits extensively from rightminding to control our most atavistic tendencies.
Llyn. It was Sally, in my ear. I have thermal imaging. Turn left through this door.
“Sally thinks she has eyes on Jones,” I relayed, and pointed the way.
We went down the corridor military style, leapfrogging, covering one another. O’Mara and Cheeirilaq were the only ones with weapons, so Carlos and I stayed under their cover while performing nerve-wracking tasks like opening doors.
That worked until we got to one with a fused control panel and a welded edge.
“Well,” O’Mara said, running a suit glove down the fresh laser bead, “I guess she’s been here.”
“And planned to stay a while,” Carlos agreed.
She would not have wasted the time to slow us down otherwise.
“It’s all right,” I said. “She’s not a very good welder.”
I stepped forward and O’Mara stepped back. There was a spot at the edge of the bead where I could catch my fingertips, and this was a Judiciary hardsuit. I popped the pry-claws out and began wedging them under the bead, into the crack in the door. A sharp snapping sound and a screeching scrape told me I was almost in.
The exo, not to mention the hardsuit, gave me strength. O’Mara braced my feet, and with a rending noise and a gasp of exchanged atmosphere, we were—abruptly—in.
We dashed through while I held one side open, in case the door’s sensors were damaged. Nobody wanted to get snipped in half. Beyond it, we reassembled. The corridor stretched on another ten meters or so, then took a curved right turn.
Friends, Cheeirilaq whispered. I hear somebody breathing on the other side.
I lifted my foot to step forward. And the shock of sudden, explosive decompression ripped me from the deck.
Things slammed against me as I tumbled: my colleagues, the walls, an equipment cart that had come unmoored. I got one sickening look at the blown-out wall after we scraped around the corridor. Pressure doors slammed behind us. At least not on us, but they weren’t going to keep us from being blown into space.
I didn’t see the net of Rashaqin silk that Cheeirilaq ballooned across the breach until we all bounced off it and then—the atmosphere having evacuated without us—rebounded and drifted slowly back inside.
“She tried to kill us!” Carlos yelped, fingers closing on a grab rail.
I used my gravity belt to orient myself. “Maybe she just wanted to get outside in a hurry.”
Carlos glared at me, then laughed in spite of himself. I could hear O’Mara’s eyes rolling in his silence. Cheeirilaq finished snipping its web free on one side with its raptorial forelimbs, stepped through, and held the flap back for the rest of us.
Sally, can you track a runner on the outside of the hospital?
Negative, she answered. I’m docked too far around the curve.
“I’ve got Starlight.” O’Mara’s voice hissed awkwardly over the suit coms. “As long as she stays near the ox sectors, they can track her by vibrations.”
“Great! Which way do we go?”
“So many terrible options.” O’Mara sighed.
I pretended I hadn’t heard him. “If I were Jones, I’d have an objective. You don’t take action as definitively hostile as blowing a hole in a hab ring until you are ready to commit to something.”
“Until the time for subtlety is past,” Carlos agreed.
Anxiety was a distraction I did not need. I tuned it down, took two deep breaths, and made myself focus. The problem with tuning the adrenaline down was that it sent the exhaustion rushing back. Human beings were not meant to operate on the edge of their capabilities like this, miracles of modern medicine or no miracles of modern medicine.
“If her cards are on the table, then why can’t I read them?” I asked.
“Because we haven’t figured out what game she’s playing, or even what the stakes are.” O’Mara kept walking forward, shifting carefully from foot to foot. Walking on magnets is a weird experience, because there’s no weight pressing your foot down against the insole of the suit. You kind of float inside it, and the boot sticks to the surface of the hab.
Well, we now know she’s not lying in wait outside. Shall we go see if she has left us a booby trap?
“When you put it that way,” I answered, “how can I resist?”
I felt bad letting Cheeirilaq go first. It was the biggest target. But it was also the active-duty Judiciary officer, and I suspected that it was much more current on its combat training than either O’Mara or me.
No matter what kind of nonsense is going on around you, the moment of stepping out of a vehicle into space is always awe-inspiring, the more so here in the Core than elsewhere. It took all my concentration not to stop and gape. Sally was there behind me, at least, adjusting my brain chemistry. I needed all the help I could get right then; exhaustion plays havoc with emotional regulation even when your world isn’t literally coming apart at the seams.
I hauled my heart out of my pants with both hands and followed it through the breached hull, and into the night.
Judiciary training hadn’t entirely deserted me. As soon as I came through the breach I flattened myself against the hull of the hospital, using the curve to protect myself from any potential incoming fire. The hospital was gigantic enough that the apparent curve was nominal, and the protection more theoretical than real—but it made me feel better. I wasn’t the only one: Goodlaw Cheeirilaq was doing the same thing on the opposite side of the breach.
It hadn’t lost hold of the energy projector in its manipulators.
O’Mara—hot on all umpteen of Cheeirilaq’s heels—flattened beside me. Carlos followed with more scramble and less Judiciary precision. He definitely moved like a pipefitter, not a soldier. At least he was being careful, though—watching O’Mara and me and trying to copy us.
It was a good thing the hab wheel wasn’t spinning, or when we used our boot magnets to hold on, the rotational forces would have tended to fling our bodies outward—and into a potential line of fire. As it was, the same curve that we lay close to because it offered homeopathic protection from incoming fire made it impossible to see where Jones had gone.
Cheeirilaq was a fantastic squad mate. Not only had it gone through the door first—and fast—but it laid safety lines of silk behind itself for us to cling to. I walked up them hand over hand, in case the hab wheel started moving again suddenly. My mag boots would probably hold, but if I had one foot off and it started up with a jerk when attitude rockets fired—well, that would suck for the people in free fall inside, but it would also suck for me. Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. And two points of contact at all times.
Carlos paced beside me. He was comfortable in EVA and by now seemed well able to manage the boots. He, too, kept a hand on the line. “I don’t know anything about this situation. So what if we logic it out? Jones’s objectives, I mean.”
I hauled myself over a projection on the hull. “You make a good point, you know. You don’t know anything.”
“That’s easier to take when I’m the one saying it,” he grumbled.
“Right, but, my point is that Jones obviously knows where she is going. Carlos, how comfortable would you be finding your way around this station on your own? Without a guide or a map, I mean?”
“I’d curl up in a corner and wait for the men in the white coats to find me.”
“I beg your pardon—”
“Never mind,” he said. “I’d have an—an emotional breakdown. A panic attack. If I tried.”
“So she came in with more knowledge than you did. She came in primed for this. She knew the hospital plan, and—”
“What changed right before she went AMA?” O’Mara asked.
Against Medical Advice was a mild way to describe her escape, but I didn’t interject.
I suspect you of asking a leading question, friend O’Mara. The latest round of sabotage took place right before Jones fled.
Sally broke in. The pattern of sabotage started before we went out to Big Rock Candy Mountain. How can it be linked to whatever Jones is doing?
“Table that,” O’Mara said. “Maybe we ought to be asking ourselves how it’s possible that they’re not linked.”
“Once is happenstance,” said Carlos. “Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” Then, a moment later, he did a double take and said, “Pattern of sabotage?”
We’ll explain later, Cheeirilaq said. I wondered if it would. For now suffice it to say that somebody has been trying to embarrass the hospital for some time.
I grunted. “This last attack was more than embarrassing.”
O’Mara shut us up with a wave
of their hand. “Starlight says the target went that way.” They pointed across the turning wheel. “What if we use jets?”
“What if she has a weapon? A ranged weapon, I mean, not a welding torch. We’ll be sitting ducks if we come flying in.”
O’Mara rolled their eyes at me, but somebody has to be the practical one. “If Jones is linked to the sabotage rather than taking advantage of a dramatic situation, then somebody in the Synarche—somebody at Core General—must have had significant knowledge of and contact with the generation ship before Afar found it and sent out the distress signal.”
“The generation ship was significantly off course,” I said. “And much closer to the Core than it should have been, given its speed and when it left Terra. What if somebody moved it?”
O’Mara sputtered. “Big Rock Candy Mountain has to be as big as Core General. How do you move something like that? You can’t slap a white drive around it!”
Oh, liquid stinking excrement. The missing gravity generators, Cheeirilaq said.
“The what?!” I yelled so forcefully I got spit on the inside of my faceplate. I hate it when that happens.
I’ll explain later, Cheeirilaq said.
I was pretty sure it wouldn’t.
“How long ago did this happen?”
About… four ans?
“I’m sorry.” Carlos held up a hand in the universal gesture for I have no idea what is going on here. “What do gravity generators have to do with my ship being off course?”
Time is gravity, Cheeirilaq said. Or gravity is time. I’m not a black hole physicist. But if you had enough gravity generators, and ran enough power through them, couldn’t you bend space-time around something even as large as a generation ship, and slide it from one place to another? I witnessed Haimey Dz doing something similar aboard I Rise From Ancestral Night, and she wasn’t even using an external generator.
“Wait! You were that Rashaqin?” Suddenly, I had so many questions.
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