Machine

CHAPTER 6

I FLOATED, SUPPORTED BY THE HARDSUIT and my exo, hardly feeling any pain at all now that the acceleration had dropped off. You get so used to hurting that when it goes away not being in pain doesn’t even feel normal, exactly. It feels like having superpowers. I had so much energy and everything was so easy all of a sudden.

So weird to think that a lot of people have superpowers all the time and don’t even know it.

I’m not blind to the irony that I work at the best hospital in the universe, amid the most advanced medical technology of I-don’t-even-know-how-many systers and systems, and they can’t fix my pain syndrome. They can’t even figure out what is causing it, exactly.

I’m something of a medical mystery.

One part autoimmune, one part neurological, one part we aren’t sure. One hundred percent frustrating.

At least I’ve got the exo, and together my machine and I keep each other productive. I give it a purpose and it gives me function. We make a good team, and even though it’s just a prosthesis, I have a lot of affection for it.

And sometimes, like now, nothing hurt too much—and those times were amazing.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’m not actually all that eager for the Synarche to get around to installing the new artificial gravity everywhere. One of the reasons I came to space was to get away from being heavy and sore all the time. When we’re home at Core General, I’ve requisitioned quarters as close to the hub as possible, and I use the therapy tanks about every dia. They’re farther from where I work than would be optimal, but it’s worth it for the lower gs.

So floating in the airlock while it cycled wasn’t bad at all. Especially as I’d taken the anti-inflammatories earlier, and tuned my system to lessen pain. I had a little cushion between me and the universe.

The outer door irised, and I found myself face-to-face with infinity.

There was pain, but it wasn’t real. It was just the expectation that something would hurt and my system’s response to it as the borrowed personalities and memories in my fox flinched from sudden light. The expectation of an injury can hurt nearly as much as the injury itself. My human eyes could handle unfiltered starlight fine, without suffering radiation burns or dazzle. What I knew and what the ayatanas knew were different, and because the memories and expectations of three different Darboof colleagues were currently wired directly into my nervous system, sometimes their reflexes won. Their atmosphere was opaque to a lot of what my species considered visible light, so they weren’t any better adapted to enduring it than I was to gamma rays.

I—or my methanogen memory-passengers—had been braced in anticipation, so I got the wincing and blinking over quickly and reasserted control.

The universe was very beautiful. I looked out through the lock into the darkless night, and the hugeness of the galaxy took my breath away.

We flew abeam of Afar, a little in advance of him in order to avoid his coils, and his hull seemed to gather and scatter all the brilliant starlight. The ship was windowless and reflective in deference to the radiation sensitivity of his crew. He bore no markings that fell into my visual spectrum. I spotted the closest airlock anyway, or rather Sally picked it out for me in senso.

It wasn’t that bad a jump. Sally and Afar were functionally motionless—their speeds and trajectories matched—and I had my navigation jets, so even if I miscalculated slightly, I could do a burn and fix it. Not that Sally would ever let me miscalculate. Our artificially intelligent friends are good at math.

So, I aimed myself at SPV I Bring Tidings From Afar—and I launched.

My trajectory was good. I nailed the v, despite having to allow for both the mass and power of the hardsuit and the mass of my insulation—and I didn’t even have to use Sally’s calculations to do it. There’s no arc in space—okay, that’s not perfectly true, but you know what I mean—and it had taken me a while to get used to moving under these conditions. You aimed where you were going—or ahead of it, if the target was moving faster than you—and didn’t worry about gravity pulling you down.

Back in Judiciary, we used to razz each other mercilessly if we didn’t get our trajectory quite right and had to waste jets. I know some of my medical colleagues think I’m a hot dog because of that, but old habits—and points of pride—die hard. After twelve years in the military and nine at Core General, most of it spent jumping out of perfectly good starships, I had gotten pretty good at this.

I was sailing right at Afar’s front door when he slowly, erratically, began to roll away from me. The distance between us, which had been closing, began to open.

Afar’s EM drive did not produce a visible signature, so—like all Synarche vehicles that were not Judiciary ships—he was equipped with signal lights along the arc of his hull. They blazed now, pulsing through a spectrum of visible light and into the ultraviolet and infrared, so it looked to me as if ripples of rainbows and darkness were crawling in bright lines along his hull.

“Crap,” I said into my suit mike. “I need to catch him. Sally, can you—” Senso took my words straight to her, as if I had subvocalized.

Afar was a fast packet, a data hauler. Not much in the galaxy could outrun him, but Sally could keep up.

A Judiciary Interceptor could outrun Sally. The Freeport pirate types probably had ships that could. A few of them. Maybe.

I couldn’t, though, in my little hardsuit using reaction mass to move around. Not if Afar decided to really get his legs on. Or fold into white space, obviously.

Burn hard, Sally answered. I will not let you fall.

Hhayazh’s “voice” came through the senso, my first indication that the flight nurse was monitoring me. Hhayazh was one of the most conscientious sentients in the known galaxy. Ambulances are not for fuel efficiency. We’ve got you.

Is Afar supposed to be scooting away like that? Don’t you have control of those drives?

I do have control of the drives. Afar himself is still unresponsive, Sally said. The ship might be executing an automated debris avoidance routine? It doesn’t look like evasive maneuvers.

It didn’t look like evasive maneuvers. It was stately, and while he was accelerating, he wasn’t pulling away as fast as he might. I burned. Chasing a runaway starship in a hardsuit like a lunatic.

This one was going to get around the cafeterias.

My heart thudded against the back of my ribs. I could lie and say it was an unpleasant sensation, but the truth is, I love this sort of thing. If he gets much more v I can’t catch him!

I know, Llyn. There’s some weird code here. I need to route around it—

Don’t slow him down, I said. I’m already correcting.

—there. That should do the trick.

The iridescent warning lights faded away, and Afar stopped accelerating. With that taken care of, it was easy enough to correct for his maneuvers—even with my limited fuel and the limited power of my maneuvering jets. I decided not to waste fuel braking, and came in hot but under control. My boots made contact with Afar’s hull a little bit back of where I wanted to be, and a little bit ventral, but three running steps (clang, clang, clang) braked me, and brought me in line with the airlock that I’d been aiming for.

There was enough force in my contact that it put a little spin on Afar, but my electromagnets held me in place until he stabilized himself. Sally, do you think that was an attempt to ditch me?

Just reflexes, I think, she answered.

I was glad the Darboof used ferrous material in their construction. It wasn’t guaranteed, with some of the extremophile systers. What you thought of as a liquid and what you thought of as a metal were strongly influenced by the sort of environment you grew up in.

At least these folks agreed with my species that oxygen was not a rock. That was potentially something we had in common… though oxygen was a lot closer to rockhood where the Darboof came from. And sometimes it was snow.

I didn’t have to glance over my shoulder to feel Sally correcting her own position, resuming her post.

I covered the distance between my landing and the hatch in under a standard minute. Afar didn’t roll or yaw again. Maybe he wasn’t trying to shake me off.

It would have been scary if I’d missed Afar, but not tragic. I had decent maneuverability in the hardsuit. And if it came right down to it, Sally could have come and gotten me. As Hhayazh had mentioned, her requisitions didn’t stint on fuel.

So I couldn’t count what Afar had done as a murder attempt. Especially since we still had no evidence that the shipmind was aware, or even alive, in there.

A little reluctantly, I folded up my incipient grudge and popped it into my proverbial hip pocket for later contemplation. I knew I had a tendency to take things personally. As Sally had suggested, Afar’s sudden roll was almost certainly the result of him not being awake to cancel out some automated evasion routine.

I was not, I told myself firmly, about to break into an extremely exotic and dangerous environment, surrounded by a starship that was trying to kill me.

Having reached Afar’s forward airlock, I passed inside. The lock functioned perfectly well once I entered the rescue overrides, which was almost a disappointment. I’d sort of been looking forward to the challenge of breaking in if Afar’s recalcitrance had continued.

Well, Sally had already gotten her drones inside.

They were waiting for me as I paused inside the interior door. My hardsuit was armor, and it—like the external hull of SMV I Race To Seek the Living—was liberally marked with the Caduceus, the Healing Leaf, the Blade of Life, the Red Crescent, the White Shell, the White Star, and every other galactic symbol of healing and nonviolent assistance recognized by the syster species of the Synarche. Optimized for recognition in diverse visual spectra.

It made for a busy presentation, but better safe than sorry. Most sentients would manage to find something blazoned on my chest that looked like help if they took the time to squint closely enough.

Now it was all blurred behind insulating foam.

Oops.

Well, I had already looked like an alien monster.

Speaking of visual spectra, when I peered through the interior airlock door, I couldn’t see a damned thing. It was dark as the proverbial Well in here. That opaque-to-visual-spectrum atmosphere I mentioned was apparently present and accounted for.

The expectations of my alien memories, that I would be able to see, made me briefly terrified that I’d been struck blind. I resisted the urge to turn on my floods—it was all deadly radiation to the methanogens, and I didn’t want to cook them by looking at them. Sally was already adjusting the suit to pick up and relay Afar’s interior “lighting,” anyway, with overlays both in senso and on the inside of my faceplate. In moments, I had a good look into a receiving area, currently empty of people and cargo and much of anything else.

The distress caused by the alien ayatanas eased up once I could see. I was still trapped in a monstrous body, hot and squishy and viscerally revolting. (Actually, the viscera were a big part of the problem. They really didn’t bear too much thinking about, as far as my methanogen passengers were concerned.) But at least my passenger memories now found our surroundings comfortable to look at, even if I was isolated from them by a layer of armor.

I felt as ridiculous as if I were taking a bath while wearing an armored personnel carrier.

I knew better than to complain. However good we’ve gotten at treating psychological and neurological illnesses, hospitals—even Core General—have an ethos of getting the job done despite personal frailty or personal feelings that, on its whole, I feel is a good thing. It does mean you don’t want to get tagged as a wuss, though, or a complainer, or somebody who doesn’t pull her weight.

Fortunately, Sally had set the overrides on my hardsuit without my having to ask, so I was relieved of the temptation to peel it off and get out in the balmy negative 170 degrees Celsius. I would have frozen solid as soon as I popped a suit latch, and the incandescent outgassing of my pleasantly room-temperature atmosphere would boil the ice-crystal builders of this ship alive.

I wouldn’t have done anything so foolish. Even ridden by my guest ayatanas, I was the one in control—whatever you might have seen on your late-night three-vee. Reality is seldom as melodramatic as entertainment. On the other hand, reality is much more random, arbitrary, and dangerous than fiction, and it’s my job to understand that to exact tolerances. Feeling like you’re the protagonist of your own story doesn’t guarantee you’re going to make it to the final act of anybody else’s.

I wouldn’t have done anything foolish. But it was kind of Sally to take the distraction of temptation away. You’ve only got so much executive function, and it wouldn’t hurt to have all of it to process whatever life-or-death situation I was about to find myself in.

Was already in, if I were being honest with myself. I could feel the chill working its way through the insulation at the joints of my hardsuit. A round sort of ache settled into the bones of my hands and elbows as the cold began to saturate them, reminding me that my time in this environment was limited.

Well, work would help to keep me warm. I nerved myself and stepped farther into the darkness.

I made sure the interior airlock door closed itself behind me. The thing about airlocks is that they’re only effective tools for retaining atmosphere when both halves are engaged. I drifted through the empty reception bay, straining my senso for any sign of life, movement, even clutter.

I picked up a whole lot of nothing. Cargo nets festooned the bulkheads, empty as the webs of hungry spiders.

It was a regular arachnid famine around here, from what was—so far—a cursory inspection. But as I drifted cautiously toward quarters, I wondered who in the wide flat spinning galaxy would waste fuel, standard months of their life expectancy, and other consumables running around in an empty fast data hauler.

The information Afar had been carrying—and was named for—was his most valuable commodity as well as his raison d’être. Faster-than-light communication required faster-than-light ships to take messages from place to place, and the galaxy was big. The automated relay of transponders and packets worked, but like any hub-and-spoke system it relied on connections happening in the right order, and on regular patterns of shipping moving in more direct lines.

It could take ans for the mail to get from one isolated node to another if the relays broke down, and even if they didn’t you could never be entirely sure of when your message would reach its destination. Data haulers weren’t resource-light, but they were a direct route.

Because they weren’t resource-light, this emptiness was weird. Unless the data Afar was hauling was critical to lives or infrastructure in an emergency sense, a ship like him would normally stick around a port long enough to pick up some stuff. So his empty bays gave me a perfectly justifiable wiggins.

There was so much about this situation that wasn’t quite right.

Most heavy rescue situations are extremely straightforward. They are scary. There are often fires, or blown vessels, or explosions, or terrible collisions to deal with. There will nearly always be people screaming, if there is any atmosphere for them to scream into.

There’s rarely a creepy, echoing silence and a dearth of anybody to rescue. Especially not on two ships, at the same time.

I followed Sally’s map deeper into the syster vessel. We carry a full range of schematics and plans for nearly every production-line vessel and some of the custom jobs, going back over a hundred ans. I couldn’t reliably pull you up a schematic for anything pre-Synarche, like Big Rock Candy Mountain—you’d need an archinformist for that—but Sally is big and powerful and we don’t haul cargo or data. Just casualties. Which means there’s lots of room in her for not only Sally herself, but ayatanas like the ones I was wearing now, medical information on every known species, and quantities of engineering data.

The last thing—along with Sally’s reconnaissance and the drones flanking me like Odin’s ravens plus an understudy—was the reason for my confidence that I was headed in the right direction if I wanted to find people. Sally said so, and until I saw evidence that Afar had been significantly altered from spec, I was going to trust Sally’s information. Besides, her drones had already been here.

Crew quarters were right where they ought to be. It had been so long since anything had gone predictably right that finding them left me with a silly little buzz of satisfaction.

I paused outside the hatchway. The hatch was open and the decompression doors hadn’t triggered, both of which were in line with the general intact state of the vessel. The space beyond the hatchway echoed the sound of my movements, though there weren’t any footsteps in freefall. It was so quiet in Afar that the rustles and clicks of my movement in the hardsuit resounded.

Sound carried differently in Afar’s methane atmosphere. It sounded weird to ox-based me, but made the part of me wearing the methane-based ayatanas homesick. There was one sound that wasn’t just my own sounds, reflected, or the pings and creaks of any ship in space. It wasn’t familiar to me, but my ayatanas recognized it.

Breathing.

I took a moment to be doubly certain I wasn’t leaking any dangerous radiation, either heat or visible light, and let myself drift inside.

I found the crew, Sally.

There they were, as promised, five spiky, multi-limbed, refractive, partially transparent living snowflakes. According to Sally’s information, this was the full ship’s complement.

I was relieved to confirm with my own eyes, more or less, that they weren’t splattered (did Darboof splatter? I supposed they might melt) all over the bulkheads. I would not have been so certain of my fast crew count if they had been.

Each of them floated in what the ayatanas informed me was an attitude of restful repose, drifting on a tether near the cubby bunks I had last—remotely—seen them collapsed against. They showed no immediate signs of injury. As I moved closer, my senso showed me the subtle, glittering movements that accompanied their respiration. All of them were breathing in rhythm, which was not—I checked—typical of this species when cosleeping.

I found the casualties. If they are casualties. Commencing exam. They all seem to still be alive.

Copy, Sally said, and left me to it.

I detached Sally’s drones now that I was confident I’d located the crew and the drone information was accurate. I hadn’t wanted to say anything to Sally without evidence, but given Helen’s somewhat delusional state and whatever had happened to Afar—not to mention Sally’s own memory lapses—I’d been harboring a few concerns about whether Sally’s remotes were providing us with accurate information.

What the Well was Afar doing out here empty, anyway?

Sally, are you finding any packets in Afar’s memory?

They would be easy to spot, being encrypted, with—virtually speaking—colorful address labels. Nobody likes the mail getting lost in the shuffle.

He doesn’t seem to be carrying anything, she said. Well, some transponder packets. Some of the same ones we have, which tells me he passed a few of the same waypoints on the way out.

So he came from Coreward. Interesting.

Why would a ship like Afar head out from the Core on more or less the proper vector to get to Terra, a major population center, and not bring any stuff with him? It was wasteful—the disgust I felt at that was something else I could share with my ayatanas—but obviously, as ambulance crew, I could also imagine an emergency so serious that it would bring everybody who heard the call at a dead run.

The problem was that if there had been such an emergency, Core General could hardly have avoided being informed about it. Hospitals are generally up on all the worst news.

There’s something else, Sally said. Afar’s storage is full, but it’s all encrypted. It looks like maybe iterating backups of his code—

Can you decrypt it?

Not immediately. But I can start.

Make sure of your firewalls, I said, needlessly. It probably came across as condescending, in retrospect. Sure, meatform, teach an AI how to program.

I sent the drones off to do one more survey and recon. Just because we had the right number of crew members didn’t guarantee that we’d found everybody on board. Or even that these were the five they were supposed to be.

It’s a galactic constant. Everybody is bad at paperwork.

My own responsible choice was to stay here and start triage and prep the patients to survive transport—and perhaps begin care—while the drones finished off the search part of the search and rescue. Then I could double-check their work and maybe check out that cargo bay with signs of construction that Sally had mentioned.

I moved toward the nearest of my patients.

Darboof have three genders. Despite that, they still manage to reproduce by budding. Nature gets up to some weird and wonderful things.

None of these were visibly pregnant, at least. One less thing to worry about.

The one nearest me was not arousable by any of the usual means, including pain stimulus. (The tool for checking this in most of these methane systers looks like a glass tuning fork, by the way.) Its crystalline eyes responded to my IR pen with reflexive sparkles as the facets tuned themselves, but that didn’t wake it, either. Neither did my careful touches with the tools I used to keep my insulated body as far from it as possible as I performed the necessarily somewhat superficial exam.

Results were all within tolerances.

What I had was a living, seemingly healthy, perfectly nonresponsive person. A delicate crystalline entity whose neurology relied on its entire body being a functioning superconductor, whose limbs articulated by means of electromagnetic currents. Its energy metabolism was so exotic by Terran standards that I’d hate to try to explain the full details of it to anyone even while wearing the relevant ayatanas.

Well, I told Sally, drunk on a little relief that this seemed to be a straightforward rescue with nobody dead, they’re not conscious, but they appear stable. I can’t figure out what’s wrong with them, but I’m not a diagnostician. My recommendation remains that we provide life support, bring the whole ship back to Core General with the patients in situ, and let the methanogen ED and ICU sort it out. It’s mysterious, but it doesn’t seem dangerous, and the problems of moving five fragile, comatose, unsuited systers across vacuum—and into inadequate life support on you—suggest that leaving them right where they are remains the course of action most likely to preserve life.

I concur— Sally started a sentence she never got to finish, because the drone that had been exploring the cargo bays pinged to remind us that there was something in one of the open holds. The drones would like to remind you of the existence of anomalous cargo, which is not recorded on Afar’s cargo manifest.

Is it likely to explode immediately?

It’s not… ticking.

Great, I said. Then I’ll stick to the plan, get these five resting comfortably, then go investigate.