Machine

CHAPTER 19

I ADJUSTED MY GRAV BELT OVER the hardsuit to make it easier to reach the controls. It did a good job of keeping me oriented to the deck. Not that a lot of other things were maintaining their alignment, but reasserting a little influence over my local environment made me feel more like I could cope with the larger situation.

A larger situation over which I had exactly no control.

All I could do was handle my tiny corner of it as best I could. And right now, that meant figuring out what had happened to Jones.

Even with the help of my exo, a grav belt, and the hardsuit, I could not keep up with an upset Rashaqin moving as fast as it was able. The Goodlaw noticed that I was falling behind. It didn’t turn its head, but spoke over channels. Friend Doctor, may I be of assistance?

I frowned at the enormous multilimbed body and felt a chill of premonition.

“As long as it’s survivable assistance,” I said.

I startled back. Was that what it sounded like when a Rashaqin guffawed? It reminded me of a whole orchestra’s string section tuning.

Raise your hands over your head and relax your contractile tissues, Cheeirilaq instructed: exactly the kind of advice that is guaranteed to produce the opposite effect.

Nevertheless, I tried. I accomplished the first part, and enough of the second not to scream out loud when Cheeirilaq produced a coil of silk from spinnerets in its abdomen and dropped the loop around my waist, above the gravity belt.

Now it bundles me up and eats me, I thought. Very politely.

Actually, the Goodlaw started running again, all its legs scuttling across available surfaces, not seeming appreciably slowed by having to tow me along in its wake.

I bounced behind it like a planetside water skier skipping off waves and managed not to fall over and be dragged. It sounds impressive, but the grav belt and the exo did a lot of the work of stabilizing for me. Which was good, because I was very confused about how many legs I had, or if I had any legs at all, and I was really sure I shouldn’t be moving this way in any of my remembered bodies.

Sentients ducked willy-nilly out of our path as we careered along corridors and through junctions. Hospital people get used to dodging running emergency staff, but I won’t pretend that one of us being a Rashaqin in a Judiciary uniform didn’t expedite matters.

We arrived back at Cryo faster than I would have imagined possible without the lifts running. A little giddily, I leaned against the bulkhead while Cheeirilaq unlassoed me.

Friend Llyn, it said, are you injured?

“All systems functioning within parameters,” I assured it, without actually checking my fox. “Just a little discombobulated. Oh good, the lights are on.”

That meant Cryo still had power, which meant that the surviving unrewarmed patients still had a chance of being alive. Three cheers for backup generators.

The pressure doors were tightly closed, and my already-hammering heart squeezed painfully when I noticed. They weren’t sealed, though, and opened readily to a pass of Cheeirilaq’s manipulator. O’Mara and Rilriltok were waiting for us inside.

Rilriltok hovered nervously near the ceiling, buzzing in agitation and—once it saw us—relief. My poor bug friend’s emotional state must have been really unpleasant if it was experiencing Cheeirilaq’s presence as reassuring. It zipped toward us, circling wide to approach me first. Wings come in handy in zero g.

O’Mara was magnetized to the deck. There’s not a lot of ferrous metal in Core General’s construction: just enough to serve as a precaution.

I was glad we had it, now.

O’Mara gave us the overview while Rilriltok cut me loose of the silk and I flash-charged my exo. Flash-charging wasn’t good for its long-term durability, but running out of juice during a pursuit would be worse. Rilriltok saw what I was doing and brought me two more external battery packs. It wasn’t on the Judicial frequencies, but we’d known each other and worked together for ans. It could anticipate what I needed as readily as a good surgical nurse could anticipate when you were going to ask for a laser pen.

Calliope Jones had apparently gotten out of bed shortly before what would have been shift change, if the hospital were currently running shifts. She had unplugged her various tubes and wires and walked out into the Cryo ward as if she’d belonged there, and nobody had managed to bring to bear the executive function to stop her. Until Rilriltok had looked up from the patient it was treating, and flown down to interpose itself between Jones and the door.

Jones had yanked an oxygen bottle out of a wall rack and swung it at Rilriltok. Fortunately for the Rashaqin’s fragile wings and exoskeleton, lack of gravity didn’t inhibit its ability to fly. It had zipped out of the way, and Jones had righted herself after the disastrous kinetic consequences of her missed swing and managed to lunge out the door.

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.

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 faster,” 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.