Machine

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.

I had made sure my hardsuit display was the full-on barrage of Terran medical symbols (Caduceus, Red Cross, Red Crescent, et cetera), and that and the flags were my only way of letting Jones know that I was a friendly—as friendly as anybody could be under the circumstances. Well, that and walking up to her war machine wearing nothing but a hardsuit and carrying no weapons. She still wasn’t paying any attention to me—which was good and bad—but she also hadn’t stopped pulling the plating off the outside of my hospital. It looked like she’d dug about a meter into the hull, which meant she had to be pretty close to the outermost pressure capsule. If she breached that, it would decompress, and more doors would come down, and more lives and limbs would doubtless be lost unless O’Mara’s orders to clear the sectors inward of us had been followed.

Nobody with a self-preservation instinct would be standing around in a doorway, but people still had to walk down corridors.

“Jens,” O’Mara said, as I continued to move forward at a steady pace, “what in the Well are you doing?”

“Gambling,” I said, but it didn’t feel like a gamble. It felt like trusting my instincts.

The iron spider towered over me as I approached. I was already much closer than was safe. Much closer than I had permission to be. The hull jumped under my feet every time the craboid drove its forelegs into the plating. An asteroid field of glittering debris surrounded it now, turning, reflecting the colors of all the Core’s weird lensing stars from edges that looked jagged and razor-sharp.

I thought about tuning back my pounding heart, the anxious pain in my throat—but adrenaline might keep me alive. It might make me that tiny bit faster.

I could deal with the discomfort. Especially when turning it off would let me remember that other things hurt more.

I waited until the machine reared back for its next blow and stepped right under the front legs. The middle and back ones gripped the savaged hull in metal claws. Ripped plating crunched as my mag boots pulled me toward the hospital’s center of spin. I raised the flags even higher and crossed them in front of me, repeating the gesture three times with a flourish between each.

This gesture was the same in the Synarche’s flag code and the archaic one: HOLD. HOLD. HOLD.

The barbed legs drove toward me. I crouched—if I jumped out of the way I’d lose contact with the hull and be drifting off into nothingness, away from safety. If you could call this safety.

I had the suit jets and could probably get back to the hospital if that happened. But nobody liked to contemplate floating around in the Big Empty without a concrete and detailed plan for what you were doing while you were out there and how you were going to get back.

The legs stopped a meter above me.

HOLD, I signaled once more.

The legs twitched.

O’Mara bellowed. I could hear Carlos in the background, so loud he came seconded over O’Mara’s feed, but somebody must have killed his suit mike’s connection to my outputs.

O’Mara got his voice to come across level, if strained. “That gunship is coming in hot, Jens.”

“Well, tell it not to shoot.” I didn’t take my eyes off the machine, though I had to crane back against the support of my exo to do it.

Moving my flags slowly, I signed, FOLLOW INSIDE.

There was no response. I almost had a sense that the machine cocked its head at me. If it had a head, which it didn’t.

I tried again, and got the same lack of an answer.

Then it occurred to me that I was overcomplicating the issue. There was no reason for Calliope—or whatever the person in the machine was actually named—to know semaphores from Carlos’s dia. Because she had to be an impostor. A well-drilled one; perhaps one who actually believed the role she was playing. You could do a lot with constructed memories. But an impostor nonetheless.

An impostor might actually know the Synarche General Flag Code, if she was a modern human. It was simple, and you needed to know it to get your pilot’s license, or to work on a docking ring, or to do a job like mine. It didn’t get used every dia every place—but it got used often enough where visual communication was the most effective means. And a cheat sheet and a set of flags were part of the standard equipment in every emergency pack that met Synarche standards to be called an emergency pack.

Which was why I had these flags to work with, right now.

I’d once seen a six-armed, radially symmetrical, massively built keee’Shhk flight-deck master use similar flags to direct two tugs and a barge simultaneously into three different landing sites. Admittedly, the syster in question had a few advantages: three brains and the ability to endure hard vacuum without a suit. But it had still been an impressive display.

I didn’t need to do anything so complicated right now. Just get the walker to follow me, and not get stepped on if it did. I fixed my gaze on that hatch in the underside. It didn’t look compatible with any of our airlocks, but that was why we carried a full suite of flexible collars and kiloliters of sticky spray foam. The great thing about space is that you don’t need a lot of structural integrity under most circumstances. Gravity is the great destroyer of structures. In free fall, the worst things you have to worry about are atmospheric pressure and torque.

As a rescue specialist, I’ve seen some things that were definitely not up to code. But, finicky and rickety though those structures might have been, they still functioned adequately for people to live in them. Until, one dia, they didn’t.

At least I was already stabilized in the same attitude and plane as the presumed front of the machine. I reached out slowly, balancing my movements so I didn’t have to waste my stabilizers or strain my exo and my core muscles holding myself upright, and showed it the flags again. Gently, I moved them into Position 10: Copy?

There was a pause. Then, with the eerie silence of vacuum, the craboid began to move. Most of its limbs remained braced. But two of them—the two closest to me, the ones that had been hovering over my head—pulled in. So did the middle pair, releasing their grip on the hull plates. Which were definitely dented and scored.

This thing was built to take a pounding, all right.

It didn’t have flags, but the whole machine moved its arms into the mirror image of mine. If it had had flags, it would have been saying Acknowledge in reply.

I hadn’t been certain she wouldn’t dig right through me to continue tearing the hospital apart. But there is something psychologically different between damaging an object—even if it’s an object upon which people’s lives depend—and directly killing another sentient being.

Now I just had to keep SJV I Really Don’t Have Time For Your Nonsense from blowing us both away.

Well, I had put my body in between the machine and the hospital. Now I guessed I was going to put my body between the machine and the guns. Maybe the pathetic spectacle of my clumsy human form in its inadequate suit of armor would move the gunship’s mind or its crew to mercy.

Mercy is a nicer word than pity, don’t you think?

There’s no whoosh or whistle of incoming, in vacuum. No auditory warning.

The gunship went over so fast and low that for a moment I thought it had struck me—or struck the craboid, which obviously stretched much farther out from the hull. I ducked instinctively, hands coming up, lifting the flags as if they could somehow protect me. I didn’t consciously register the ship’s outline before it had gone, and had to pull the memory out of my senso to be sure of what I’d seen.

One of the guest surgeons in my head tried to flatten itself into some purely conceptual long grass. Another one wanted to rear up to bring its horns into play. The results were predictably comical, and only my mag boots kept me on the hull. I had to get all of them out of my head.

The gunship was white-space capable, but she’d flipped her coils horizontal to the fat teardrop of her hull, so the effect was not dissimilar to the virtual target circle I still stood in the middle of. Her gunports were open, and in that retrospective glimpse I could see the muzzles of mass drivers tracking as she sped past.

Nonesuch is going to come around again, Cheeirilaq said. Do you require fire support, friend Doctor?

I looked up at the looming machine. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t think she’ll hurt me.”

A crackle of static caught me unaware. I jumped inside my suit. “Dr. Jens? Is that you?”

Jones’s voice. A coms link? A coms link!

“You saved my life!” She sounded angry.

“I’m a doctor,” I said. “That’s what I do.”

Stand down, I told my team, and felt their assent—and how grudging it was—through the senso. They said nothing, though, and for that I was grateful.

Calliope Jones was yelling at me enough for everybody. That was fine, because she wasn’t crushing me like a bug with her giant bug machine.

Why had the volume in my helmet been cranked up so loud in the first place? I lowered it, which actually made it easier to understand what Jones was screaming at me.

“That’s a lie! You’re one of them! You want to experiment on me, like all the others!”

Did she mean that all the others wanted to experiment on her, or that there were a lot of others being experimented on? It sounded like a sophipathology either way, and I didn’t have time to worry about it now.

“Look, Jones,” I said, when she paused for breath. “Calliope. Why don’t you come out of that thing? We’ll dock it somewhere, and you and I can sit down with a drink and talk it over?”

“I want coffee,” she said, and for the first time I could hear the exhaustion in her voice.

“Don’t we all,” I agreed. “Are you wearing a suit?”

I thought she probably had to be, to have gotten to the machine at all. But in a situation like this—essentially a hostage negotiation—you do whatever you can to keep the conversation flowing. People who are talking aren’t coming up with terrible ideas.

“Yes.” Reluctance colored her tone. “I have a suit on. Mostly. I retracted the gloves and helmet for access to the controls.”

“Does that walker have an airlock?”

Silence. Then after what felt like a long time, when I had started trying to think up another question to ask her—

“No.”

I hadn’t thought it did, but we’d never gotten a good look inside. So even if I had my rescue kit, I couldn’t force the door—that hatch I’d spotted in the machine’s belly—and extricate her without killing her unless I got her to suit up first. Not that we’d been able to penetrate the thing’s hide anyway. Nor could I go in there without getting zapped.

I wished we’d had the time to figure out how to get a drone inside the craboid without it getting electrocuted. It was all very inconvenient.

I was going to have to secure her cooperation, then.

“Did you turn off the countermeasures?” I asked her. “That walker zorched the drone we tried to send inside.”

“I had the code,” she said. “I just… I knew what I had to do, when the lights went out. It was like a dream, or…”

Or a fugue state, I thought. Like a programmed series of trigger responses, set off by a particular external stimulus.

Okay then. Hmm. “Calliope, would you consider stepping out of the walker?”

“I… can’t,” she said, with a kind of nauseated finality that made me disinclined to push the point. The craboid wavered.

“Okay, okay. If you don’t feel safe coming out, what if you suit up and let me come in? Is there room in there for two?”

I remembered the empty cargo space inside the walker. I bet that was where Calliope’s cryo chamber had been stored. Before it was placed among all the others on Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Then I wondered about the machine, and the rupture in the hull. I recognized that, as if with a magic trick, that rupture had forced our selection of which cryo pods to bring home in the first shipload.

Calliope said, “I didn’t say I don’t feel safe. Don’t twist my words.”

She had—though not in so many words. She had said with her allegations of nonconsensual experimentation that she didn’t feel safe. But it was pretty obvious that she was reacting rather than thinking, and much of what she was reacting to was inside her own skull.

“You don’t trust me, though?”

She laughed. “Of course I don’t trust you. You pretend to be nice, but I know what goes on here. They told me.”

“…They?”

I couldn’t see her, or feel her through the senso—but I still sensed the change in her and the moment when she snatched herself back like a coral retreating into its shell.

“They control your brain,” she said. “They tell you what to think, and you believe them because you don’t have a choice. They put a box in your head, and you don’t have a choice the same way I didn’t have a choice before I got that box taken out. They steal people and cut them up for parts. You steal people and cut them up for parts. I remember now. I didn’t before. I thought I was somebody else, but now I know.”

“What would I do with a lot of people parts?” I asked reasonably. I thought, but did not say, There are cheaper sources of protein.

“Rich people use them to live forever.”

“We can clone organs when we need them,” I reminded her. “And even that can’t keep people alive forever. Everything wears out, even brains.”

She snorted. “For a doctor, you’re really naive.”

I thought I was part of the murder cabal. I didn’t say that, either. She was obviously not thinking very clearly.

Hostage negotiation has never been my most natural skill set. I did study hard, but when I’m under pressure the sarcastic side of my mind still provides all the things I shouldn’t say. I’m sure that as long as I filter them out before they actually leave my mouth, it’s fine.

“Look,” I said. “I’m going to sit down. My legs are tired, and it seems like we might be here for a while.”

My legs were tired, but folding them up wouldn’t change that when the only thing holding me to the hull was mag boots. Making myself look small and relaxed might serve to de-escalate the situation, though, and sometimes you have to try every trick you can think of. Also, there were four alien surgeons in my head, and every single one of them used something different for an inner ear. Their disorientation was making me nauseated.

So I magnetized my rear end and stuck it to the hull. I had plenty of ox and plenty of battery, so now it was a matter of waiting for Calliope to have a change of ideation. Or at least a moment of lower paranoia. Or exhaustion.

It’s amazing how you can wear people down if you keep them talking. “Look. You said yourself that I saved your life. You saw the gunship. She was going to shoot you to keep you from destroying the hospital—”

“I wasn’t trying to destroy it. I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

I didn’t point out that she’d been disassembling a hab wheel with I-didn’t-even-know-how-many people inside, and I get an extra cookie for that. I said, “Neither do I. And I want to keep you from being hurt. I kept the gunship from shooting you. Why would I protect you if I were one of the bad guys?”

A dry laugh. “Maybe you want me for parts.”

“It would have saved a lot of resources not to have woken you up, in that case.” I tapped my thigh armor with my fingertips, thinking. It echoed inside my hardsuit.

“You wanted to learn about the generation ship first.”

“Somebody sent you,” I said. “Somebody built that machine you’re in and put it in a ship full of casualties so we would be sure to bring it back here. Somebody moved Big Rock Candy Mountain and put you inside her and arranged things so that you would be one of the first we rescued. And somebody built a lot of triggers into your brain so that when certain things went wrong, you’d have no choice except to get on your horse and ride. So I have to wonder, Calliope—why this particular spot, to start prying apart the hospital? And what were you digging for?”

“Evidence,” she said.

“Evidence of what?”

“Evidence to broadcast.” The machine waved one appendage in an airy gesture. “Evidence of what goes on in here. Evidence to make people stop you.”

It was obviously sophipathology, but the conviction in her voice still gave me a chill.

“Well, you were digging in the wrong place,” I said. “These are environmental controls.”

She snorted, a harsh sound over the suit mike. “Is that what they told you?”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. Took a deep breath. Said, “This is a hospital.”

“Look, I’m going to try coming out,” she said. “I’ve done all I can from in here. Either people will investigate or they won’t. Let me suit up.”

A moment passed. I might have worried, but then the belly hatch irised open and atmosphere puffed away. I made myself stay still: I wouldn’t make her come out any faster by pacing in circles.

Jens? O’Mara asked.

Stand by. Call off the gunship; she’s unsealing.

She wasn’t coming out fast at all.

“Dr. Jens?” The fear was back in her voice.

“Calliope?”

“I can’t get loose. I’m stuck.”

Instantly I was on my feet. “Stay calm. I’m coming.”

“Jens, this is a terrible idea.”

O’Mara, on a different channel. Out loud, as if to be sure I heard them.

I made sure my channel to Jones was closed before I answered. “I do rescues. This is business as usual.”

“If you go in there we’re going to have to put you into quarantine, too.”

That made me pause. “I was already in Afar. And Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

They continued, “We don’t know how long it will be before we’ve got control of the meme, Llyn.”

“And if the quarantine isn’t lifted?”

“You can’t move around freely until it is.” I heard their shrug in their voice, and contained anger. Anger at me, I realized. “Look, I know that rushing into dangerous situations is what you do, and how you feel alive, and you’ve chosen good careers to put that tendency to use. And some people are going to tell you that’s heroic. But this person chose her own path and tried to kill a lot of people, and if she’s stuck in there, oh well.”

They still weren’t wrong. But they weren’t right, either. “I don’t think she got a lot of choice—”

“Ignoring your own needs constantly is selfish and makes a lot of work for other people.”

“This is not your everydia sort of situation.” I wondered how the gritting of my teeth came through the link. “Are you going to order me not to, Master Chief?”

It was a low blow. I knew O’Mara didn’t love having a desk job. But this was my hospital, and we didn’t just let people die here even if they pissed us off, and—

—and if Calliope had been trying to kill people she would have busted through an observation wall in one of the cafeterias, not spent a bunch of time digging up a well-protected section of hull with nothing but machinery underneath.

“No,” O’Mara said, after a long pause. “I’m not going to order you not to treat your patient, Doctor.”

I de-magged, kicked off from the hull, and let myself drift upward. My aim was pretty good, and this hab ring was no longer rotating, so I didn’t need to touch my jets or the edges of the hatch as I drifted through.

The door was just a door.

I don’t know exactly what I expected inside the machine—Calliope asphyxiated with her suit unsealed, maybe. Alien technology like twisted metal brambles impaling her.

Not a perfectly normal command chair in a perfectly normal cabin, and a suited woman struggling with restraints that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on any pilot’s seat.

“Hey there, Specialist.” I moved up next to her. She pulled against the straps. I moved her hands away and tried the latch; it seemed to be jammed.

There were cutters in my emergency kit. I got them out at the same time I stowed the semaphore flags. “Just hold still for a few seconds. I’ll pop you right out of there.”

Her face and her panicked expression were plain to see through the plate on her suit. I kept talking as I felt around the harness and aligned the cutters. I wasn’t really concentrating on what I was saying or if it made any sense. What was important was the tone.

She yanked against the straps, which meant she yanked against me. I put my free hand on her shoulder. “I need you to hold still, Calliope. I’m going to cut the restraints now, and I don’t want to hole your suit.”

To her credit, she held still. In a small voice, she said, “Okay.”

I watched while she unclenched her hands. Dealing with that level of adrenaline couldn’t be easy without a fox.

I reached out extra carefully, watching my hands so I wouldn’t get confused about how long my arms were. I snipped one restraint, close to the buckle.

She jerked back so sharply I was afraid I’d holed her. But she was staring over my shoulder. “Look out, Llyn!”

I ducked and started to turn, pulling the cutter up and away—the only safe direction. I wasn’t fast enough. A glimpse of a multicolored tendril snaking toward me—familiar from my experience on Big Rock Candy Mountain—was my only warning besides Calliope’s cry.

An impact. The hiss of venting atmosphere. A wild flail with the cutter—

Shit.

I fell.