O’Mara laid a glove the size of a catcher’s mitt on the forearm of my hardsuit. “This is not the time.”
Sally said, You would burn the generators out.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “But what if you didn’t care? What if you never planned to use them again?” Then I stopped, and put my own hand on O’Mara’s enormous biceps to steady myself. “What if the, the tinkertoy machine had gravity generator technology built in? What if it replicated itself, copied the tech from the missing generators, held the ship together—and moved the whole shebang? Accelerated it and redirected it? Put it someplace it would more likely be found?”
We’ve only had the technology to do that for approximately five ans, Cheeirilaq said. The experimental gravity generators went missing approximately four ans ago. If you did use a self-replicating microbot to reinforce the entire ship and fill it with devices like this belt—it tapped its own—and you didn’t care about sacrificing the functionality of the technology in the process… If all that, then I suppose…
“It’s a theory,” Carlos said.
O’Mara sighed so deeply I felt the hardsuit shift. “This is huge.”
Huger than a conspiracy to sabotage the galaxy’s biggest interspecies hospital? But I didn’t say that. I said, “I know where she’s going.”
They all looked at me. Cheeirilaq’s head rotated an unsettling two hundred degrees.
She’s going to the walker, it agreed. It switched to broadband, addressing all the hospital’s Judiciary staff. Evacuate the sector!
Almost in unison, O’Mara snapped, “Get those people out of there!”
* * *
I thought it would probably be faster to cut back inside and move through the hospital now that we knew where Jones was going. We were already suited, and wouldn’t need to change between environments. O’Mara overruled me on the grounds that the internal corridors were still a mess of triaged, untriaged, treated, and untreated casualties. Climbing past injured people floating around in zero g was dangerous, not to mention rude.
Bleakly, I wondered what percentage of the hospital staff were on the injured list. At least as long as the recyclers stayed online, we could print as much medication and food and as many bandages as we needed. Until attrition and inevitable lossage led us to run out of materials. Then we would have to start feeding the corpses in.
I sincerely hoped it would not come to that.
The craboid walker was moored halfway around the circumference of the hospital. And if we weren’t going inside, we couldn’t cut across the hub. We were going the long way around, I guessed—and this was going to require some interesting athletics.
In my already exhausted state, I was not looking forward to it.
How worn out was I, actually? Well, there was one way to find out. I tuned back my compensation and my pain management, as a status check, and gasped out loud.
Pain of overuse cramped both my hands, the outside of my left calf below the knee, the arches of my feet where I had jammed them into loops to hold myself in place at various times when there wasn’t enough ferrous material around for the mag boots to be useful. My quadriceps shivered with the pain of pulling those mag boots loose from the hull over and over again. My eyes burned and my head throbbed and my whole body felt bruised with exhaustion.
All on top of my usual aches and pains.
Cheeirilaq’s smaller limbs sawed worriedly against the larger, but the sound of its stridulation did not carry through vacuum. The Judiciary translator rendered its concern to my fox.
Friend Llyn, are you well?
I had my mouth open to lie about that when good sense intervened. One’s colleagues need a reasoned assessment of one’s capabilities in a crisis, not bravado.
“A lot of discomfort,” I admitted, tuning it back down again. “I’ll need a moment to change my exo battery.”
“Are you capable?” O’Mara asked.
Fatigue levels exceed healthy norms, my exo told me.
“Tired. But I’ll hold it together. I have to.” The leads snapped home to the second battery. Carlos took the first and stowed it somewhere.
“Jens—”
“Oh, leave her alone,” Carlos said. “She said she could do it. Either she can, or she can’t, and riding her about it just wastes everyone’s time.”
I wondered if he knew he was talking to the head of security for the entire ox sector. If he knew, I wondered if he cared. I remembered his flare of homophobia that had so discomfited me.
People are so complicated.
Enough, said Cheeirilaq. It’s time to move.
* * *
The Goodlaw led us across the curve of the hospital at a punishing pace. Fast as we were going, high as my state of nerves and alertness remained, the enormousness of Core General left plenty of time to worry. And to feel betrayed. I hadn’t known Jones well, but I had liked her. I’d thought she liked me.
Aw, crap. I had a crush on her, didn’t I?
Sigh. Well, as long as I knew it, I could take steps to counteract it, I supposed. Romantic feelings were so tiresome. And so inappropriate, when dealing with a patient, but human beings are programmed to get attached to those we caretake, or those who take care of us.
And so we hurried along the surface of the hab, trying to remember to stay alert for incoming fire as the minutes stretched into a quarter of a standard hour and more. I wished I believed that Jones was not enough of a monster—or enough of an idiot—to discharge a projectile weapon at somebody standing on the surface of an inhabited wheel. But I hadn’t flunked my threat assessment classes, back when I was still in the Judiciary, and the fugitive we were hunting had already decompressed a section of a habitation, and appeared to be working with accomplices who thought nothing of committing a major terrorist attack against a hospital.
Moreover, I didn’t have that much faith in humanity, and right this second I definitely didn’t have that much faith in Jones.
I had no right to feel betrayed. She hadn’t made me any promises. But here I was, feeling betrayed as hell. And also nauseated, since at least two of the systers in my head did not appreciate the sensations of moving fast in free fall.
“Starlight says she’s reached the walker,” O’Mara reported. We were still about three minutes away.
“I hope she has as hard a time getting into it as I did,” I said between gasps for air. The pain in my calf had spread up my IT band to my hip, and no amount of tuning could kill it completely.
One would hope, Cheeirilaq responded. But somehow the notorious perversity of the universe never seems to maximize in a direction convenient to ourselves.
She’s in, Sally agreed. The machine is starting to move.
“Great,” I said. “Now we get to chase her.”
“Yeah,” said O’Mara. “And she’s got a tank.”
* * *
It wasn’t much of a chase, as it happened, because Jones and the damned walker hurtled right over us and back the way we had come. We all had a moment of terror as the spiked legs slammed down on every side and the teardrop-shaped body hustled over. Cheeirilaq slung a loop of silk at it, but didn’t connect. Probably for the best, because being dragged behind that thing would be no fun at all, even for a Rashaqin.
Like characters in a comedy, we all whirled in our footsteps and went zooming back the way we had come. The craboid was a lot faster, and you can’t run in mag boots. They only work if one of your feet is in contact with the hull.
We need fire support, I heard the Goodlaw say, and felt a sinking sensation. A Judiciary gunship would be responding. It was the right choice to make… but it was a choice that could cost more lives. So I hated it.
The chase ended moments later when we came around a stanchion that supported the local segment of the currently unusable lift tube system, arriving in time to see the spidery, barb-legged walker rear back and punch both daggerlike forelimbs right into Core General’s unprotected hull.
“We need that gunship out here fast
er,” O’Mara said, and I heard the crackle of response from Judiciary operators inside the hospital.
I almost squealed a protest. Projectiles could miss and hit the hospital, and I honestly didn’t want anything terrible happening to Jones. She was…
I didn’t know what she was. She wasn’t a person lost out of time, acting in panic. She wasn’t an innocent. She was, right now, an existential threat to a hospital full of sick people and innocent staffers.
And well, fuck, what were three humans and a Rashaqin—even a Rashaqin with a beam weapon—meant to do against a terrorist in a combat walker? A terrorist, I might add, whose sense of mission included the ruthlessness to have herself frozen in a dubious cryo pod on a crumbling generation ship to await a rescue that might never come.
Yes, I had pretty much abandoned the idea that Jones was a real crew member of Big Rock Candy Mountain. Helen remembered her… but Carlos didn’t. And Carlos’s memory was not reprogrammable the way Helen’s was—or mine was, for that matter.
Cheeirilaq and O’Mara were right to call for backup. As much as I hated it.
The shock wave of the impact kicked my mag boots. O’Mara gestured me behind them—funny how you fall back on the habits of silence and hand signals even when you’re operating on a closed, scrambled coms channel—and we ducked back into the visual cover of the stanchion arch. O’Mara sent a drone around to peek, and as we all rode the feed we regained visual on what Jones was doing.
You can’t evacuate a hospital. Not really—not without causing as many casualties as you are trying to prevent. So many fragile patients with extremely specialized needs. So many who simply cannot survive being moved because they need continual support.
I had devoted my professional life—which was my entire life, to be honest—to protecting and helping those people.
And there was Jones in the walker burrowing away at the skin of my home. At the physical manifestation of my vocation.
I hadn’t believed—not really believed—Jones would do that until I saw it. I still wanted to grasp at denial. This can’t be happening. How could somebody I knew—a real person, an acquaintance that I liked—do something so terrible?
O’Mara grounded the drone at once, and we all crossed our fingers that it hadn’t been seen. Well, Cheeirilaq doesn’t have fingers, and whatever your digits are, you can’t really cross them in a hardsuit anyway, but you know what I mean.
So that’s what the barbs are for, I thought, watching the craboid wedge a pair of them beneath a hull plate and lever the edge up in the eerie silence of vacuum. No puff of crystallizing atmosphere followed: At least it wasn’t a breach. Yet.
My own mental tone had the curious dissociated deadpan of crisis. I didn’t realize I’d thought it loud enough for my fox to pick up until Carlos responded, “That looks like a wrecking bar had a bastard baby with a spider crab.”
I winced, but he wasn’t wrong. Just crude and archaic.
We have to stop her. Cheeirilaq whetted its raptorial forearms together: nervous grooming or preparation for combat, I was not sure. I worried for the transparent insulskin covering its exoskeleton, but it didn’t seem concerned. Around its abdomen, the webwork of oxygen tubes that supplied its respiratory needs inside the hospital connected to the same kind of standard Judiciary ox pack I was wearing, though Cheeirilaq’s was no doubt set to a richer mix. That same fragile-seeming insulskin suit expanded and contracted with the pulse of its breathing.
I wished it were wearing a hardsuit. I suppose its own exoskeleton must suffice; most Rashaqins that left their low-gravity homeworld had ceramic reinforcing threads woven into their chitin as a sensible precaution. Surely Cheeirilaq would have done that before going into a career in military law enforcement.
“What the Well is she doing?” I asked.
O’Mara grunted. “I should think that would be obvious. She’s digging a hole in the hull.”
“Yeah. But… why?”
Cheeirilaq turned its head inside the transparent bubble that protected its sensory equipment and looked at me. The drone feed still showed no deep-space snowfall of crystallizing atmosphere… yet. Core General had a tough skin. But it was only a matter of time.
I remembered what Cheeirilaq had said about the human ayatana, and its uncanny attempts to mimic human gestures, and nodded. “I’d like to try to stop her before we have to use that deployed gunship. In addition to the danger of damage to Core General, there’s a person in there. And I want to understand… I want to understand what’s behind this action.”
Carlos’s voice stretched to hold his incredulity. “A person who’s trying to kill a whole bunch of your patients, Doctor.”
“Yes,” I said. “And if we kill her, we’ll never find out why. I feel like I have a personal connection. Let me talk to her.”
O’Mara broke a long silence with my name. “Llyn—”
I looked at them and they looked at me. The hull under our feet vibrated
“Fine,” they sighed. “Don’t make me write a letter to your daughter.”
Be careful. Cheeirilaq darted one raptorial forelimb out and tapped me on the shoulder sharply. I glanced down, surprised the razory tip hadn’t drawn blood. Score one for the hardsuit.
Carlos stepped in front of O’Mara. “You’re going to let her go out there in a space suit to face that… fucking tank?”
“I’m a rescue specialist,” I said, because I didn’t appreciate Carlos appealing to O’Mara as if I weren’t an autonomous adult sentient. There was that atavistic nonsense. “This is my job.”
Carlos reached out to grab me, but I was better at space shit, let’s be honest here, and I eluded him easily. He didn’t elude O’Mara, and a moment later I stepped out from behind the lift arch and walked across the hull toward the walker.
CHAPTER 20
SALLY,” I SAID, “ARE YOU still there?”
Absolutely. What are you going to do about this?
“I’ve got an idea. Let me check this emergency pack—hey, would you look at that?”
I pulled out two small tubes, each about as long as my hand was wide. Each had a little flat disc at the top. I fumbled at the discs with my gloves but got them pulled out. Each unfurled into a flag on a stick, with a wire at the distal end to keep it rigid.
“Old-school,” I said, grinning behind my mask. “Semaphores. Can you look up pre-Synarche semaphore codes for me?”
I already had them, Sally said. Which is lucky for you because I can’t download anything, between the quarantine and the power failures.
She passed the codes on to my fox. They were straightforward, and I thought I could manage.
I still moved toward the walker. It ripped the hull plate up some more, forelimbs striking downward, daggerlike, while the midlimbs popped and pried. The vibrations shuddered through the hull, making the bones in my feet and ankles ache even more than they did already. Electricity arced around the walker, blue sparks bridging and crawling up its arms. The charge didn’t slow it down at all.
But it also didn’t seem to have noticed me approaching. Or if it had, it didn’t seem to care.
I realized I was anthropomorphizing the craboid. Pretending it was acting on its own, without a person inside it. That would, I thought, make it easier to cope in the event I couldn’t hold the gunship off.
Water-ice fountained briefly into snow and drifted away to space before the ruptured pipe froze and sealed itself. A hundred meters from the busily destructive machine, I unfurled my little flags and struck a pose.
Sally spoke through my fox. She said, Synarche Judiciary Vessel I Really Don’t Have Time For Your Nonsense is inbound. ETA five standard minutes. You will need to be at least twenty meters clear of the fire zone for the shipmind to guarantee your safety.
Copy. Mark the fire zone please?
Sally popped filters over our perceptions, showing a green ring and crosshairs superimposed on the hull.
What’s under that? Cheeirilaq asked.
Machine rooms, Sally replied. Environmental controls.
Ox sector? O’Mara guessed.
There was a pause. A brief one, but any pause beyond the polite ones to allow slowbrains to process is significant in an AI.
No record, Sally said.
What do you mean, no record? The machine still wasn’t responding to me. I kept walking. I’d still be outside of its immediate striking range if I stopped at the edge of the target zone.
The schematics I have on record don’t list what these environmental controls are for.
Isn’t that weird? I asked.
Drop it, O’Mara interjected. Just stop that thing.
But—
But a lot of things. But it was weird. But it could be useful to know what was under the machine in case it—or the gunship—punched through and let whatever was in there… out here. Or left it spreading through a series of projectile holes to adjacent sections.
Oxygen was poison, if you were the sort of person who breathed an atmosphere rich in chlorine gas, for example. Water was poison if your blood’s chemistry was closer to ethylene glycol. And vice versa.
One did not simply muck about in a multispecies environment without due consideration for the biological needs of everybody in the adjoining corridors. Why can’t Sally access detailed schematics on this area? What is Jones digging to?
Something here was very wrong. And not letting Calliope Jones get killed was my ticket to finding out what that was, exactly.
* * *
“Jens, stop!”
I was a half meter inside that glowing green target zone, and O’Mara’s yelling in my ear was nearly drowning out Sally’s yelling through my fox. The craboid hadn’t disassembled me yet, which was a data point in my favor. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be reading my semaphore signals, either.
Admittedly, it’s not a language system optimized for Hey, want to get a coffee? I think we need to talk.
Not that you should ever say to anybody, “I think we need to talk.” Not unless you want to spend the next fifteen standard minutes dealing with an adrenaline response.
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