Machine

CHAPTER 30

I DON’T KNOW WHERE SHE CAME from. I don’t know how she got there. But Helen was there—suddenly, brilliantly, shining in the damaged flicker of the corridor lights, surrounded by sparks and coils of blue smoke. The machine glittered iridescent black from all the facets of its components. What had become of its playful, toylike colors? Had it shed them when it went to war?

Helen, in the face of it, gleamed warm gold, reflective. The light surrounding the two peripherals was brutal, changeable. Arcs of electricity limned a pall of fire-suppressant flakes drifting ineffectually from above like planetary snow.

The hardsuit would keep me from suffocating.

For a moment, everything felt still. Helen, me. The machine. A draft swirled the flakes away in a Coriolis spiral. The hospital was still spinning, still making gs. And somewhere nearby there was a hole in the outer hull, and we were losing atmosphere. The pressure doors should be falling.

The pressure doors did not fall.

Something somewhere deep in the bubble’s infrastructure was broken. Something somewhere had catastrophically failed.

My laugh echoed brutally inside my helmet. Sitrep: What wasn’t fucked up beyond all recognition? It was likely to be shorter.

I’d fallen. Fallen, or been knocked down. I was lying against the corner where the bulkhead met the deck. Tossed aside like a discarded doll. I put a hand on my grav belt. Crushed beyond use.

I needed to get moving. And first, I needed to get up.

Helen faced the machine. She was tiny before it, tiny in a corridor designed to pass systers like Tralgar and systers in environmental suits that amounted to armored, tracked vehicles. The machine towered. Piled up like a thunderhead, pulling itself out of bulkheads and the deck, billowing into all the space beyond.

I put a hand on the deck. I hauled on the grab rail. I would never say an unkind word about grab rails again.

I got a knee under me.

The exo helped me stand.

The machine bulged left. Helen stepped to block it, hands outstretched.

The machine retreated. Coalesced.

I tried to straighten. I have never felt so heavy in my life. Someone stepped toward me. Human, in a hardsuit. Tsosie. I knew the way he moved. Another someone beside me. Also a hardsuit. Unfamiliar. Also almost certainly human, by the shape.

They put a hand on my elbow, levering me upright. Through the plate, I glimpsed a face. Carlos.

I opened my mouth to protest, and he winked and shoved me behind him. To Tsosie.

“Dammit—”

Tsosie tugged my arm. “The machine won’t hurt him. Come on.”

“The machine will punch through bulkheads to get me,” I argued. “It’s decided I’m the enemy. It’s not going to change its mind. And the pressure doors—”

Weren’t working.

“—I have to stay here.”

Tsosie tugged me one more time. Carlos calmly walked forward—putting his body between us and the machine. On the theory that the machine would not do anything to risk him. But I knew—we all knew—that the machine’s program was haywire. That it would do plenty of dangerous things because its protocol for risk assessment was utterly corrupt.

Accidents happen. Around something like the machine, accidents happen a lot.

I magnetized my boots to the deck. “Carlos is making the wrong choice.”

“The wrong choice for you. But he isn’t you, is he?”

I couldn’t pull my gaze away. I tried to move forward. Tsosie held me. He’s making the right choice for me. That’s the problem. I’m supposed to be the one who takes risks around here.

“This is all my fault,” I said. “I had a terrible idea.”

“If it was a terrible idea, we all had the exact same one. So share the blame a little.” Tsosie edged me back a step while I was distracted.

The machine broke, as if a dam broke before it. Like a thunderhead rolling over itself, climbing an updraft, it poured past Helen on all sides, tendrils running along the corridor walls, filling the space with a hideous clattering that echoed inside my helmet until I wanted to clamp my hands over my ears. Now I lunged in the other direction—backward, dragging Tsosie, knowing it was ineffectual. Knowing we could not move fast enough.

Helen… flared. Expanded. Exploded, her body unfolding into a swarm of shimmering armor plates with a black-red furnace contained—barely—in between.

“I forgot she could do that,” I said.

The machine poured past her like a tidal wave, going wide, avoiding Carlos. There was no place for Tsosie and me to retreat to.

Helen slammed a hand out and clutched the machine, a fist clenching in its structure. She swept a half-disembodied arm through the clattering bots and dragged them into an embrace. They swarmed; she wrapped around them. Pulled them in. Shoved them into herself, surrounded them, internalized them. Dragged the reaching tendrils back, hand over hand over hand.

Consumed them.

Made them a part of her, once again.

“Fuck,” Tsosie said, frozen in his mag boots.

“Fuck,” I quietly agreed.

The machine turned. Pseudopods swarmed Helen, raining blows at her. She parried, tore. A ringing blow against her chest, against her head. Her own arm rising golden out of the black swarm. More bots, and more, pouring out of the bulkheads, pouring out of the floor.

“Carlos!” I shrieked. But he was already lunging. Lunging into the swarm, which parted before him, peeling apart like dust motes repelled by a static charge. I glimpsed Helen’s shining skin, her blazing core.

Carlos threw his arms around her, and the machine sucked itself back. Reared up, like a snake about to strike.

Wavered.

He whirled around. Turned on the machine. Took one step away from Helen. Snapped his faceplate up to yell with his own voice, not the suit mike: “Leave her the hell alone!”

The machine fell back again.

The weakened structure of the corridor ceiling and bulkheads, dragged with gs by the hospital’s spin, caved. I had an instant to register the machine, Helen. Carlos with his hands flung upward, fending off the debris. A terrible rending, a pop. A crash.

The hull, somehow, held. It took me a moment to realize that Tsosie and I weren’t being hurled outward, slung away by the spin. Weren’t starting the longest fall. I rocked. The collapse had missed Tsosie and me. The level above dropped tiles, wiring, structural materials. Wires snaked down, sparking, hopping.

Helen and Carlos were gone.

I lunged, and Tsosie lunged with me. As one, through years of experience, we dove on the pile of debris. The machine hovered over us, twitching. Rattling.

Unsure?

I grabbed a hunk of plating and hurled it behind me. A structural support—a big twisted beam—lay across the rubble. I crouched. Locked my hands under it. Heaved.

Tsosie was beside me. Lifting. He didn’t have the exo, just the hardsuit, so I was stronger. I felt it give, a little. A little more.

The machine loomed over me. Deciding. Deciding whether to kill me, I supposed. Deciding whether Carlos might still be alive under there. Deciding whether I could help him.

My exo wanted to stall on me, or at least grind along much slower than I was willing to endure. I was exceeding its tolerances. It was a combat and heavy-rescue model, and I was still asking it for things it was never meant to do. I dumped adrenaline and painkillers into my system. Anything to keep going. Keep digging.

Make the effort. Get them out.

“On three,” I said to Tsosie, his gloves beside mine the thing of which I was most aware.

The machine made up its mind. Swung forward, tendrils spewing from its blunt nub end. I hoped I could take a hit. I hoped it wouldn’t go for Tsosie.

Something surged out of the rubble a couple of meters away. Shining, golden. Shedding plates of debris.

Helen.

She tilted her burning facelessness up to the machine. It kept coming.

She held one hand out, fingers wide. Clutching. “You killed him.”

The machine halted its thrust. It froze. Clattering. Glittering.

But it did not move at all.

Helen stepped forward, out of the debris. “Your judgment is overridden,” she told the machine. “Your protocols are suspect.”

It clattered louder. I didn’t look. I was digging. Perhaps it shivered.

She reached out and put her hand against its jointed surface. “You. Are. Mine.”

Like a dog lying down at its master’s voice, the machine lowered itself to the devastated floor.

Tsosie and I kept digging. Maybe she was wrong.

There are a lot of hard things in this world. There are a lot of things that get left behind.

Helen used the machine to pry up debris, to free Carlos much faster than Tsosie and I, working alone, could have managed. His hardsuit was misshapen; he wasn’t breathing.

Tsosie looked at me. I looked at Tsosie.

“Any chance is better than no chance,” I said. He deactivated Carlos’s suit. I pulled the actuator away and started manual CPR.

Cheeirilaq, O’Mara, and the others arrived some minutes later.

We were still trying.