Machine

CHAPTER 12

DECONTAMINATION WAS PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD. THERE are stalls all over Core General—near every equipment locker, and at every transition zone between environments. Sally herself is designed to decontaminate everything that comes in or goes out, if necessary.

Fortunately, I didn’t need to get my hardsuit irradiated. Just doused in a little antiseptic and scrubbed down, so it was over quickly. I returned to Sally, left my hardsuit in my locker, and argued her out of a rest period on the grounds that I was supposed to report to the Administree.

Reporting to the hospital administrator didn’t involve anything so commonplace as taking a lift to an office. There was a lift—funny how we still use such antiquated terminology in an environment with no up and nothing to lift against except spin, and for a transportation pod that goes in all sorts of directions—but where it disgorged me was back to the outermost layers of the station, far from the machine bay or even the docking stations.

This was not an office, but a park. An upside-down sort of park where the sky was underfoot and the grass grew over your head. One of the weirder things about getting your gravity from spin was that when I came out of the lift I had to walk down a curved ramp to the transparent outer layer of the station. Having accomplished this, I had the unsettling option of looking down past my feet at the outside, or even lying down and pressing my nose against the shatterproof lumium for a more comfortable angle.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t here to bask in the view. I was here to give a report, and I knew it. I had hopes of avoiding being called on the decking… but time would indicate whether I would get away with my hide intact. I didn’t know that I had done anything wrong, but getting a note from your boss that says “See me” is never a pleasant experience.

Core General’s administrator would not have fit in the office I mentioned before. To be fussily precise, they also did not fit entirely into the park. But a lot of them did, and the majority of their organs of sense and thought were concentrated here.

I stepped off the bottom of the ramp, walked a few steps over the whirling, vertiginous space below to free up the landing for anyone else coming or going, and craned my head back at the ceiling.

Or rather, at the whispering canopy of leaves largely obscuring the next-innermost onion layer of Core General. The leaves, shiny and green-violet, rustled as if there were a breeze behind them. I could make out the windows beyond, leading to levels inhabited by a variety of different species.

This far out and on this side of the hospital, they would all be carbon dioxide or other compatible metabolisms if they weren’t ox types like me, and they would all be species who could tolerate a certain amount of grav and rads. But that was where the resemblances between them would end. I could make out lights intended to mimic the illumination of a dozen suns without turning my head. Soft gold and pink were, to me, the most appealing, followed by the glow my eyes—being adapted to it—saw as a pleasant, neutral white. There were other colors—by my standards worse colors—actinic or merely unpleasant.

We ox breathers shared our habitat sector with not only the carbon dioxide metabolisms, but with a couple of weirdies who breathed nitrogen as well. (No, I don’t know how you use nitrogen as an energy catalyst: I’ve got enough to do keeping track of the various oxygen metabolisms I come in contact with daily.)

The section admin I was craning my head so far back to look up at was one of the CO₂ breathers, albeit one without any lungs. Core Gen’s administrator for my bio type, as well as allied and complementary bio types, was a really, really, really big tree.

They might not have been the biggest tree in the galaxy. But then again, they might. They were a Vnetheshallan, from Shhele, and hospital rumor claimed they had come to the Core as a mere seedling. Their people, as a race, were mobile and vaguely humanoid in appearance in their younger instars. As they aged and became ready to reproduce, they returned to their homeworld, where they put down roots—literally—and generated seeds and offspring. And wrote a lot of poetry, created what their species considered great art, and so on.

All except for this one, who had put down roots right here. Or put up roots, or put in roots perhaps, because if you considered the direction of growth, their roots went toward the center of Core Gen and their leaves reached out, filtering light from all these endless stars to feed their hungry cells.

They had grown through and into the superstructure of the hospital. In a real sense, their body was Core Gen. Or at least a significant chunk of Core Gen, ox sector. (Carbon diox sector, from its point of view.)

Job security, I supposed.

I was apprehensive going in, to be perfectly honest. I’d never had an easy conversation with the being most of us jokingly referred to as the Administree. Their nervous system was not centralized into anything we mammals would recognize as a brain, and their thought processes were not linear in a sense most humans would recognize, but ran in multiple parallel tracks at once. Talking to them always made me feel like I was having an argument with a ball of coked-out snakes.

I mean, in a good way. But still.

“Hello, Administrator Starlight,” I said. “You wanted to see me?”

The tree’s name was not pronounceable, but it translated as Grows-in-Starlight, which was pretty and accurate. I knew that their fox would translate for them as mine translated for me. When they replied, their “voice” came through the senso clearly.

[Doctor/Coordinator Jens,] said Starlight. [Can you explain your professional choices to us?]

“You believe I made the wrong choice in staying on Big Rock Candy Mountain when Tsosie wanted to fall back?”

[Perhaps. Do you?]

“I’ve reviewed the ayatanas, mine and Tsosie’s. I can’t be certain, quite honestly. I believe I made a choice that worked out as well as any choice could have, under the circumstances.”

[You don’t think that contact with atavistic humans was an unnecessary risk?]

My species’s premodern behavior has left us with something of a reputation, I’m afraid. “I was wearing some vintage ayatanas—”

[And their information didn’t convince you to leave?]

They weren’t unrightminded humans, and Starlight knew it. They were calling my bluff.

Starlight didn’t have eyes, per se. So I wasn’t quite sure how it was that I felt them studying me. Perhaps vast branches bent subliminally toward me as they focused their attention. Perhaps I was merely self-conscious as all get-out.

“That’s not what you want me to defend, is it?”

[You are capable of self-criticism,] they said. [That is good.]

Well, if the military taught us anything, it was how to accept discipline and how to accept praise. Often at the same time.

It was a skill that I saw coming in handy right now. I nodded to accept the compliment, if it was a compliment. You could never be sure. Starlight’s senso would translate the gesture for them as a form of human communication. Whether they understood me any better than I understood them—well, who could tell?

After a few moments, as if to see if I would fill the silence, Starlight said, [You brought a weapon into this hospital.]

Helen? Were they talking about Helen? The machine?

I would presume they were. If I had misunderstood, we could backtrack. I had come to understand that Starlight’s seeming aggression and rapid-fire sequences of contextless questions weren’t intended to give offense. It was just… how Starlight communicated.

I said, “Helen? A person. A patient. I brought a patient into a hospital. That’s what hospitals are for.”

Starlight seemed not to notice my indignation. It’s hard to tell, when dealing with really alien systers, what they do or do not comprehend about any communication, even if it’s translated for them. And the frustration, naturally, flows both ways. It’s hard to translate experiences outside of context.

The Administree said, [It’s a threat.]

I still wasn’t sure if they were talking about Helen, but they hadn’t contradicted me. “So are a lot of things we handle here. The machine is a person in need of healing. Should I have turned her away?”

[You also brought crew members of an unknown vessel, and a vessel that had met with an unknown accident, back with you.]

“We can help them, too. And you—well, the hospital, the Synarche, anyway—sent me to get them.” I paused and thought. “You could have refused us docking privileges.”

[We considered it.]

Ouch. “It was a weird trip,” I said.

[Be that as it may. She wants you as a care liaison.]

“She… what?”

[Helen wants you to be her liaison. Apparently she trusts you.]

I did not have time to be anybody’s care liaison. One of the physical symptoms of panic to certain members of my species is a coppery taste, if you were wondering. “Is she ready to be released on her own recognizance?”

[Dr. Zhiruo offered her an uncorrupted, air-gapped space within the Core General architecture in which to rebuild and update her personality modules under Dr. Zhiruo’s supervision and with her help. Dr. Zhiruo says she’s already more integrated. She’s going to bring in the hospital archinformist as well, to work with integrating the machine once Helen is stable. Messages will be going out to the other archinformists serving on I Rise From Ancestral Night at the site of the generation ship. So, no, she’s not ready to be released. But it’s Dr. Zhiruo’s professional opinion that it is safe to let her observe the care of her crew, and start integrating her into society.]

“I’m not qualified to be a care liaison.”

[Technically,] they said, with a pedantic tone that carried even across senso translation, [you’re extremely overqualified to be a care liaison. But the job should not be a problem for you. Which is good, because we are dealing with a dual first-contact situation. A form thereof, anyway. Helen’s encountered Terran humans before, but not the Synarche. And her crew, if any of them live, might as well be aliens.]

“At least we can figure out how to speak their language.”

[Your reports indicate that you already have studied their language and attempted speaking it to Helen when you met her. See?] Starlight rustled. [We are confident in your ability to do this job. We’re only formalizing a role you’ve already adopted.]

“What is she going to do when Sally goes out again?”

[Sally is under repair.]

“That won’t last forever.” I felt like I was having the conversation I’d had with O’Mara all over again, and not in a good way. Going over their head was never going to work, anyway: hospital administration might disagree among themselves, but they knew how to present a unified front once a decision had been reached.

Usually, I enjoyed the lack of politics. Usually, I enjoyed not reporting directly to the Administree, whose conversational style was, well, branching. Discursive. And I couldn’t always see how one topic hooked up with the previous one.

Starlight rustled, [Right now, Dr. Jens, you are needed here.]

I bit my lip and decided, for the time being, to save my ammunition. “I wanted to talk to you about this mission anyway. Something about this doesn’t add up.”

[Elaborate?]

“I’m worried about the coincidences,” I admitted. “I’m worried about the operations of three different shipminds, if we count up Sally and Helen and Afar, being affected, their memories—and in one case their consciousness—being damaged. I’m confused about the timeline, but it seems very strange that Sally’s memories would be sabotaged before she encountered two other ships with damaged shipminds. While she was on her way to find them. Responding to their distress beacon, in fact.”

[Yes,] the administrator agreed. [That is odd. I give you permission to enjoy exploring this question in your new role.]

“You’re asking me to play detective?”

[We understand that Master Chief O’Mara already has made such an investigative request of you. They believe you are suited to the task, and we trust their judgment.]

They really were all conspiring against me. “I don’t want to lose my berth. I have no ambitions to be anything but what I am, Starlight.”

[You’ll have your job. This is not a punishment, though you seem to think it is.]

I sighed, and blew a straggling coil of hair out of my eyes. “It’s been a long dia.”

[Get some rest,] Starlight said kindly.

And that was how, after a rest period that I was surprised to spend deeply asleep without any self-interventions (and without interruptions from other members of the hospital staff), I wound up playing secret agent/detective/tour guide to a sexy robot. If that sounds like the sort of punishment that would be handed out in a particularly surrealist purgatory, congratulations. You’re not wrong.

And I wasn’t as familiar with a lot of the hospital as I should have been, because I hadn’t spent very long grounded since I first came to the hospital for training.

Do they still say “grounded” when you’re on a spinning platform in space?

I imagined that my grounding wouldn’t really sink in until the first time Sally, having completed repairs, left without me. Left with a different rescue specialist in place. Somebody, I knew, who might want to keep that berth when I was free to fly again.

O’Mara had been very careful to withhold certain things from me. From what they’d said—and what they’d chosen not to say—it seemed likely Sally might be docked for longer than the dia or two it would take to get her back up to spec. But how much longer was the question.

The hospital couldn’t afford to keep a resource as scarce as 50 percent of its ox-sector fast-rescue fleet locked away indefinitely when lives were at stake—unless the risk of sending her out outweighed any possible consequences. So O’Mara might stall for a little while, and keep Sally off the milk runs that a Judiciary ship or a more ordinary vessel could handle. But eventually lives would depend on speed, and Sally would go.

And unless I had solved the crime and shepherded Helen through treatment, I would stay behind. Gnawing on my fingers behind closed doors and trying in public to compartmentalize and do my job.

The Administree had said this duty wasn’t a punishment. They had told me I wasn’t being declawed and decommissioned. That suggested that they were telling the truth, and there was a return to my old job waiting at the end of this assignment.

But it was hard to believe I wasn’t being punished when I knew very well that “my old job” was not even remotely the same as—or any guarantee of—my old berth. I enjoyed working with Sally and her crew. They were all good people and good at their jobs. I liked them. I trusted them. Even with Loese joining us so recently, we had become a team—a real machine. I didn’t even think I drove Tsosie to any more distraction than he drove me.

And I dreaded going through the break-in and assimilation process with a new crew.

When you live with people for months on end, the relationships come to mean a lot to you. Moving from one such berth to another is not dissimilar from getting a divorce from one family and moving immediately in with the next.

One divorce was enough for this lifetime.

And thinking about divorces wasn’t helping my emotional equilibrium any. I couldn’t dwell on the pain and confusion it caused me right now. So I needed to find something else to think about.

And I couldn’t live in fear of a future that might not happen. Not during work hours, at least: I had to function. I had a job to do.

Actually, I had two jobs to do. Maybe three. All of them full-time, and all of them conflicting with one another. What I could do that would help me with at least two of the tasks in front of me was download an ayatana from one of Core General’s engineers so I at least knew my way around as well as anybody, and do the busywork assigned to me. That might also help me get a pattern on the sabotage attempts: nothing like a bat’s-eye view for getting the lay of the land.

Oh, for the love of little space fishes, another Void-spawned ayatana.

At least I found one that belonged to a syster with a biology and taste buds that were pretty close to human, although the physiology was a miss.

Back to thinking really hard about peeing.

I walked out of the Memory Department feeling like half my legs were missing and I was likely to tip over at any moment. I somewhat alleviated the sensation by trailing my fingertips along one wall and letting my exo handle holding me up, but every time I blinked I could feel the hospital spinning. To add insult to injury, I had been issued my new gravity belt, per O’Mara’s orders, and I couldn’t even risk using it because of my acquired dyspraxia.

There was a lot of Core General to cover in the orientation tour I’d been asked to conduct. Since I had to narrow it down somehow, I collected Helen from her room and started her toward the cafeteria. Helen didn’t eat. But she might enjoy the social hub. And frankly I liked my groceries as much as any sentient I’ve ever known, and the hospital has better food on offer than the ambulance ship’s limited galley.

Fortunately, the engineer in my head was an expansive, good-natured person with a possibly unhealthy fascination for strain tolerances, and I was perhaps a little tipsily ebullient as I brought my charge down to the third-tier ox caf a little before first-shift main meal. I decided to be kind and get on the intranet before we arrived so we could still have a good chance of getting a table in a corner, before the real flood began. I would have gone to get actual coffee, but the cafe that served it was most of the hospital away, the decontamination process on the way out took twenty minutes, and anyway the ayatana I was wearing made me feel vaguely nauseated when I even thought about it.

Sigh.

My gamble worked, and I reserved a four-top by a viewport, with the bustling space of the Core on one side and the bustling cafeteria on the other. We arrived, I left Helen to hold it down, and I went through the line.

I scanned the metabolic codes and consulted the food preferences of my inner engineer. It’s a terrible idea to nauseate a simulated passenger who is using your body for its physical responses. Which is how I wound up with spaghetti and fruit salad with a healthy sprinkle of freeze-dried crickets.

Simulated crickets, obviously. We’re not barbarians.

We returned to Helen. I was a little surprised that she had cheerfully plunked herself down with her back to the room. I realized I had expected her to be stereotypically paranoid, like a character in a spy story. She seemed contented, though, and I started scarfing up my lunch as fast as I could ply my chopsticks.

Helen picked up a pair of chopsticks as well, and began experimenting. It was interesting watching her practice with them. She was a fast learner, and got measurably better at it over the course of one meal, even when she was lifting squish-ripe mango, slippery as a liver, before putting it back in the bowl so I could eat it.

Helen did not consume organics, obviously.

“Any questions so far?” I asked, around a mouthful of spaghetti. My mother and my old CO would both be horrified by my table manners.

Luckily they weren’t here.

Helen turned her unsettling suggestion of a face to me. “Can I see my crew?”

I swallowed quickly. “I should have made arrangements to take you there first. I’m sorry. Give me a moment.” I tapped into senso and filed a request to visit.

It was while my attention was turned inward that my old friend Dr. Rilriltok fluttered up, with the kind of timing that makes less savvy species accuse male Rashaqins of being telepathic.

The cafeteria was in an inner portion of the wheel, so the force of its simulated gravity barely affected Rilriltok, and it could even fly on its dazzling, crystalline wings—without using the gravity belt to compensate. It did mean that those of us who were eating had to be gentle when we gestured with our utensils, lest we send a dollop of mashed potato or globroot floating into an unsuspecting colleague’s airspace. But there was enough spin to keep your orange juice in the glass. After twenty ans in and out of space, that was almost a luxury.

“Don’t be alarmed,” I said to Helen as Rilriltok approached. “A giant bug is about to land on the table.”

A moment later a giant bug landed on the table, wings buzzing to a gentle halt while their breeze stirred my hair. I balanced a cube of cricket-sprinkled melon between my chopsticks, shielding it from the wind with my other hand. Nobody wants surprise cricket in their air intakes.

Helen was staring unabashedly. Can you stare without eyes? Anyway, her focus was locked on Rilriltok.

She asked, “Is there any news of my crew?”

Greetings, friend Jens, said Dr. Rilriltok. Greetings, Helen. One moment and I will acquaint you with the status of your crew. There has been no immediate change and there is no immediate danger I see that Dr. Jens has filed a visit request for you; may I assist you in preparing psychologically?

“Do I require psychological preparation?” She was looking at me.

“Hospital visits can be stressful,” I said, with as little irony as I could manage.

Rilriltok set a tray in front of where it perched. As its head dipped forward, its large raptorial forearms craned up and out of the way. The blades were delicate-looking and translucent as fine porcelain, and as glitteringly sharp as a ceramic knife blade.

The smaller manipulator arms began selecting pieces of what looked like raw sliced lobster, shell and all. I’d been known to eat the cooked version—they were synthetic land prawns—but I still averted my eyes as the crunching and squishing started.

Rashaqin do not use their mouths to speak; they communicate through a combination of stridulation and controlled breathing through the spiracles on their abdomens. So they have no taboo about talking with their mouths full.

Rilriltok flipped its wing coverts and buzzed, Helen, I am pleased to tell you that we have completed the DNA sequencing of your crew members without compromising the integrity of their compartments.

Helen looked from Rilriltok to me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I do not have the vocabulary for what it just said. Can you help me?”

She seemed… calm. Maybe Zhiruo’s therapy was helping. I suppose nothing is likely to make you more anxious than feeling like you can’t handle the cognitive load that’s expected of you. That you’re used to handling.

I found her a dictionary easily enough. It didn’t take long to translate for Helen, who was still apparently compiling and integrating the code and assimilating the uplink that would give her access to real-time translation through a link to Linden’s functions.

Most of us ran translation through our foxes, under most circumstances, but the sheer volume of species and languages at Core made that impractical. The hospital probably played host to enough human languages alone to overload my fox’s storage capacity.

Zhiruo had provided the tools for Helen, and had assured me that the kit she’d issued was firewalled to Well and gone. Air-gapped, even. I told myself that if the Core General wheelmind and the head of AI Medicine thought it was safe, it was probably safe. And she was rebuilding her entire mind from a kit, so it wasn’t reasonable to expect her to have finished integrating.

Rilriltok picked up another slice of synthetic land prawn. I went back to my spaghetti. Friend Jens, why have you been avoiding me?

I choked on that spaghetti, which was very upsetting to the engineer ayatana, who was much more sensibly designed with regard to airways and food passages.

At least it didn’t come out of my nose. It’s a bad dia at work when that happens. Especially in front of an alien doctor who’s going to wind up asking a lot of interested and helpful questions about sinuses and be very confused why humans evolved so stupidly as to let our respiration and food nutrition use the same set of tubes.

It’s a bad design. I admit it. Nobody asked me for my input until it was far too late!

By the time I got myself under control enough to glare at Rilriltok, there was no sign of any mischief in its posture. There was no point trying to make eye contact—which eyes would I choose? All I would see in any of them was my reflection. Rashaqin do not have muscles in their faces to give them expression. The chitin is pretty, and excellent armor, and makes performing surgery on a Rashaqin an incredible pain in the ass involving a skill saw to open and epoxy to close. But it does not move.

It did scintillate with faint ripples of red and silver that might be laughter, and might just be enjoyment of the food.

It reached out a fine manipulator, and snagged a strand of my spaghetti. I broke the strand with my knife before it could weave my entire plateful into a braid and slurp it up.

After so many ans, I was wise to Rilriltok. For an obligate insectivore it certainly had a taste for Terran carbohydrates. It claimed that this was because synthetic land prawn didn’t have stomach contents, depriving it of important nutrients. I had told it repeatedly that it could order its own salad.

The gesture of food-stealing had special meaning when performed by a male Rashaqin (male being something of a misnomer, as even Terran species don’t limit themselves to two tidy sexes that always behave in the same predictable ways, but Rilriltok’s species has two sexes and its is not the one that lays eggs). It meant that Rilriltok saw me as a colleague and a competitor—an equal—and not a threat, or an inferior. It was a compliment and a display of affection.

I should have swiped its land prawn in response, but I wasn’t in the mood for sushi.

“I haven’t been avoiding you!” I protested. It had only been—well, less than two diar, right? I had possibly lost track of my actual assigned rest periods. “I’ve just been… very busy. And so has Helen, here.”

I looked at her to see if she needed that translated, but apparently she’d gotten the common vocabulary all right.

I had been very busy. Exhausted, and sleeping like the dead on the one chance I had gotten. Wedging research into a few spare hours. Running from meeting to meeting…

I don’t just mean since this last emergency call, Rilriltok said.

…And trying not to spend too much face-to-face time with my friends when I wasn’t on duty. Rilriltok was right. I had been hiding, and not just since this last mission. Hiding from my friends, because I was afraid that they would notice that my pain management was not what it should be. And then they’d want to do something about it, being doctors.

The way O’Mara had.

Doctors never want to hear that you’re sick and tired of being poked; that you want to be left alone; that you’ve had enough experimental cures and management strategies for one lifetime. Doctors always want to try this one last thing.

Doctors are an enormous pain in the ass. Trust me. I know. I am one.

Time to change the subject, in other words.

“What do you know about the safety issues since I’ve been gone?” I asked in what I hoped was a light, gossipy manner.

Male Rashaqins did not, historically, survive without a very well-honed sense of other people’s goals, motivations, and appetites. Part of why they made excellent doctors—and champion players of strategy games—was that they were fantastic at thinking outside the ordinary and at noticing patterns too subtle for most beings to detect.

I think they are concerning, Rilriltok said, after a moment of meditation. They are, I think, meant to look as if they are intended to look accidental. But they are not intended to look accidental.

I had to parse that one a couple of times before I was really sure what I thought it meant. “You think whoever is doing it is… acting out? Wants to get noticed?”

I think someone or someones are doing it. And it’s dangerous and constitutes an enormous risk, so either they’re severely damaged, or they have what seems to them an exceedingly good reason. It patted the antigravity belt strapped around its thorax with one feathery foot-tip. You could talk to the Goodlaw.

I hadn’t met Core General’s new lead law enforcement officer. I also knew that the sexes of Rilriltok’s species went out of their way to avoid interacting with one another. “But isn’t it a female Rashaqin?”

That consideration should give you context for how seriously I take this. Rilriltok picked up its beverage. It put a straw operated with a sort of squeeze bulb between its mandibles, not having the ability to suck, and seemed entirely focused on imbibing its drink. This was a mechanically fascinating process, involving manipulating the squeeze bulb until a honey-colored bubble, held together by surface tension, appeared at the top of the straw. Rilriltok then nibbled at it with the small wiggly mouthparts that were barely noticeable at the bottom of its wedge-shaped head.

“What is a Rashaqin?” Helen asked.

I waved to Rilriltok with the back of my hand. “The doctor here is a male one. Well, sort of male by Terran rules. The sort-of-females are bigger.”

Much bigger, the meter-long Rilriltok said, stridulation unaffected by its beverage.

“Oh.”

I could see Helen processing. I couldn’t get over how alertly she watched conversations, head moving as if she were following a zero-g jai alai match. “I think I would like to meet such a creature.”

Person, Rilriltok said, straight-facedly.

Which, okay, is another one of those anthropocentric terms, since we have this weird habit of using our facial muscles to communicate even nuanced emotions. Most sentients don’t go in for that sort of thing. Even if you limit your sample to systers with faces. Or even to systers with facial muscles.

Unlike my friend Rilriltok, for example.

“Pardon?” Helen said.

“We say person,” I clarified. “Creature is impolite.”

“Oh,” Helen said. “I’m sorry. I… I would really like to meet such a person.”

It would be good for you.

I wondered if Rilriltok thought so for the same reasons I did. It niggled at me that O’Mara had recruited me when there was a perfectly good Goodlaw heading up hospital security. Was there some reason they didn’t think it could get the job done? Or was it O’Mara being turfy, and relying on their old and trusted associates, as they’d hinted? While I was wondering, Rilriltok set the beverage container on the tray, sorted my dishes into piles, and stacked them up.

Fortunately, I hadn’t wanted that last soggy cricket anyway. I placed my chopsticks across my fruit bowl and stood. So did Helen. She didn’t seem to have any trouble calibrating her motions to the shifting pull of simulated gravity. That was impressive. I was accustomed to switching back and forth, and it still took a while each time for me to acclimate.

I picked up the tray to take it back to the disassembler and said, “Come, on, Helen. The doctor here probably has to get back to work. Let’s walk with it, and check on your crew.”

Helen very quickly got her wish to meet the female Rashaqin.

Core General’s new Goodlaw was ahead of us in the admin and observation room when we arrived in the Cryo treatment center. It had hooked one foreleg over the safety rails that circled the lounge—as if an object the size of Core General was going to stop spinning—and was peering out into the Cryo unit with predatory fascination.

When we entered, the Goodlaw turned its head, faceted eyes glittering. It wore a dress uniform: a tidy, tailored little navy blue bolero jacket over its upper thorax, with cap sleeves cut to fit the upper joint of thorned killing limbs that I estimated would be a couple of meters long, extended.

I knew it was the Goodlaw, and not some other Rashaqin, because the jacket had a gold badge embroidered on its placket, and I could still read Judiciary ranks and uniforms.

Rilriltok had apparently not expected to report to work and discover an enormous natural enemy next to its desk. It came mandible-to-mandible with the mantoid—two-plus meters long even with its thorax held upright over its abdomen, and with raptorial forelimbs longer than Rilriltok’s entire body even when folded—and swiftly and prudently alighted on my back. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that it had folded its wings tight and color-shifted to match my lab coat and scrubs.

I couldn’t blame it.

I wondered if the Goodlaw had been waiting for us, or if this was a chance encounter. I guessed this was my opportunity to find out.

Greetings, the enormous predator stridulated. I am Goodlaw Cheeirilaq. You must be Dr. Brookllyn Jens. And… Helen Alloy?

Politely, it pretended not to notice Rilriltok, who huddled closer to my spine. Rilriltok’s coverts clicked tightly closed, protecting its delicate wings. The barbs on its fine manipulators tangled so thoroughly in the dense springs of my hair that I worried it would take surgery to get us disengaged.

Rashaqin reproduction is harrowing. Their entire social order is built to keep adults well-separated, with lots of private space, so they don’t accidentally eat one another. The spawn are aquatic and generally not considered to be sentient until they pass through the nymph stage and emerge on land in their penultimate instar as miniature adults. At this point, they are taken into crèches and educated by carefully organized, regimented communities of adults.

This is probably for the best, as the spawn are both numerous and cannibalistic. On Rashaq, they’re left to fend for themselves until they molt out into that educable stage.

Swimming is not encouraged for tourists on Rashaq. Rashaqins, as responsible sentients, do their best to avoid reproducing elsewhere. It’s hard on the local ecosystem. Also on their colleagues, as the egg-laying sex generally eats the other during the reproductive interlude, unless they’re already extremely well-fed. I understand that in modern society, the—we’ll call them females, though it’s not entirely accurate—generally bloat themselves with food before intercourse or resort to technological intervention for fertilization. And the males—like Rilriltok—tend to feed everybody they meet.

When I was still Judiciary and visited Rashaq a couple of decans ago, they were in the midst of a natural child-rearing fad. There had been a lot of articles about how the egg-layer eating the progenitor was much healthier for the young and rendered them more competitive in the wild. As there are, demographically, significantly more of Rilriltok’s sex, competition for mates is pretty extreme, and a surprising-to-me number of males volunteered.

Things might have gotten even uglier than they did, but Core General and the Judiciary both sent crisis intervention teams, and eventually the fad blew over with only a few dozen casualties who hadn’t signed up to be eaten. We managed to catch all the perpetrators and remand them for rightminding.

Anyway, my interaction with the Core General medical team there was how I got interested in working here.

“You’ve identified me correctly,” I said. “We’re here to check on our patients.”

Well, the patients were mine and Rilriltok’s. They were Helen’s crew.

Close enough.

I stepped past Cheeirilaq toward the window, raising the arm on the far side of my body so Rilriltok could use it as a bridge to scuttle around to the front if it felt it necessary. My colleague seemed to be at the mercy of its freeze reflex, however.

Cheeirilaq kept a respectful distance, and I assumed if Rilriltok needed to leave it would let me know.

Beyond the windows, the familiar coffins lay side by side, raised on racks that brought them up to a convenient height for most species to work at. Doctors and technicians of several species moved calmly around them, reading instruments and peering at whatever lay behind open panel covers. All the coffins we had brought back appeared to be here, and appeared to be intact.

Helen’s relief was palpable even before she said, “None of the systems have failed.”

It was still too early to be certain of that, but it seemed like a terrible time to point it out, so I didn’t.