This syster wasn’t wearing a full suit, just a harness and mask. It stared at me like the last cat I tried to teach algebra to.
I mimed giving an injection and pointed in the general direction of the pharmacy. The tech—which looked like a very alert feather duster with tufted owl ears and plumed moth antennae—focused all its sensory apparatus on me for one tense moment. Then it tipped down at the reader, back up at me—and whisked away in a puff of reaction jets.
I mimed hand-washing to one of the two remaining medics—both of whom were fully engaged in keeping pressure on the patient’s injuries—and sprinted with ringing magnets and aching knees across to a disinfection booth. I climbed in, suit and all, and let it blast me.
The decon stations were near the private unit I’d sneaked into the previous dia. I found myself glowering at the closed doors while my suit was rinsed and flash-dried. Why weren’t those staff out here helping?
The moment of rage was washed away by a flood of gratitude toward the rest of the hospital staff. Here we all were, side by side, up to our elbows in a dozen colors of gore. They were rewarding my faith on this terrible dia.
I’ve said that I’ve never been somebody who had faith. Not in the religious sense, and not in the secular sense of unequivocal reliance on the trueness of some premise or person. Not the way some people do. Except for my job, and my community.
And in that moment, I felt a faith and a connection to my community and their purpose that I imagine equaled any religious epiphany in its intensity. I was a part of something, and the thing I was a part of served a mission and a purpose that mattered as much as anything can matter in a vast and uncaring universe.
This was where I belonged, and this was what I ought to be doing.
Take that, Alessi.
My ex-wife used to tell me that the problem with our marriage was that I didn’t believe in anyone or anything. In retrospect, I had come to believe that her actual problem was that I hadn’t believed in her.
For the first time, I found myself wondering whose failing that had been.
* * *
The nature of battlefield epiphanies is that you don’t have the time to appreciate how profound they are—or are not—at the time. Thirty standard seconds later, I was back in the treatment bay. I held my scrubbed hands out in that weird broken-elbowed way that hospital people instinctively know to avoid, no matter what appendage is being dangled awkwardly away from contaminated surfaces. I wasn’t sure why I was bothering; there was literally nothing sterile about these circumstances.
I guess points for trying?
Staff were administering the meds Sally had recommended when I returned. They acted fast. The patient didn’t lose consciousness, but their pain-tense body relaxed against the stretcher. Beads of what I assumed was sweat dewed grayish skin. The stentorian panting softened. They were getting oxygen now. Tourniquets had been applied to the wounded limbs so I could work without groping through a sea of blood. That had to have been contributing to the pain: tourniquets hurt. Somebody had draped our makeshift surgical field.
This is what people who know what they are doing and aim to save lives can accomplish even when they can’t effectively communicate.
Somewhere behind me, I heard screaming. Human, possibly. I could have treated that patient competently without an ayatana, but I didn’t have time to worry about it now, already being in the middle of my own primitive surgery. Somebody less qualified would have to deal with it. I tuned my racing heart back: my current patient could not wait until we had appropriate facilities, until we could grow grafts and perform the surgery while they slept painlessly through it. Right now, we didn’t even have an anesthesiologist. Just a lot of sedatives.
I held out my hand on an arm that was too long and too short and not flexible enough and very squishy, and realized that I couldn’t ask for the forceps precisely as one of the blood-spattered medics laid them in my hand. I wanted to smile my gratitude, but the mask would have hidden my expression, and anyway very few systers take teeth-baring as a friendly gesture.
So I said “Thank you,” out loud, hoping that if I said it a few times the sound would acquire meaning for my colleagues, and bent down to bathe my hands in the blood of the wounded.
* * *
I clamped and stitched and cauterized, somehow finding myself in a zone of total focus where the noises of half a hundred different species trying to make themselves urgently understood seemed distant, unreal. By any standard from the current millennian, the work I did was horrifically crude. There wasn’t enough skin to stitch across the stumps. It didn’t matter, because the limbs would be replaced with grafts eventually, but all I could do right now when I’d stopped the bleeding was to seal the raw ends with synth.
When I finished with that patient, somebody grabbed my elbow and walked me to decon, and then to another casualty. I almost understood some of what it was telling me—almost. Could I use the ayatanas for translation purposes, if I had the right ones?
No time to find out, currently.
Somebody else brought me an external battery for my suit, which was when I realized I ought to charge my exo from the suit, too. In an emergency, keep your batteries close and fully charged.
There was another patient after that one, and another. I looked up once and found myself assisting Rhym. That was good, because Sally could translate for us. And the mere fact of being close to my surgeon friend made me feel 50 percent less anxious that something would go horribly wrong.
However horribly wrong it went, Rhym could handle it.
Another time, I looked up and the person across the table from me, holding out the tool I needed before I knew I needed it, was Hhayazh. Best surgical nurse I’ve ever known. I spotted Tsosie once or twice. Everybody was head down, working, grunting and waving to communicate.
Somebody brought me soup and water. I drank the soup with my eyes closed, holding my nose so my neural passengers wouldn’t notice what was in it and potentially take offense. Later, somebody brought me tea. I ate sandwiches with my eyes averted, trying not to gag. The suit was equipped to handle bathroom breaks.
I looked up again as another patient was slid out from under me. Directly into the glittering compound eyes of a massive adult female Rashaqin.
It stridulated at me, one raptorial forelimb snapping. I recoiled so hard I almost sat down on the floor. I would have, if there had been any gravity. As it was, I rocked ridiculously on my mag boots before my exo and my core muscles stabilized me.
Then I realized from the bolero jacket and the glittering badge that it was Cheeirilaq, and swallowed against my racing heart. It felt like it was stuck in my esophagus, but I got it down on the second try.
“Oh Well,” I cursed. “What now?”
Cheeirilaq reached out, delicately draped a barbed hook around my bloody glove—I was on my fifth shade of blood already todia—and tugged me very, very gently toward the door. It was holding on to various railings and appurtenances with assorted limbs.
I realized how much my feet hurt. They were so swollen that I could feel the insides of my mag boots pressing creases in my flesh. My hands, if anything, were worse. There’s some stretch built into my exo, but the suit was less accommodating.
I looked back over my shoulder, toward the station where I’d been operating. Somebody else was already mag-stepping into the place I’d vacated.
Cheeirilaq herded me into a corner with gentle pokes of its spiky, razor-edged forelimbs.
“I need to go back to work.” I raised my hand and pointed. There was less chaos now, I realized. Fewer people bleeding and waiting their turn. Staff members bunking in their suits on tethers along the walls.
Exaggeratedly, distinctly, the Goodlaw shook its head.
I stared at it in disbelief.
It did it again.
The gesture was utterly nonhuman, a quick rotation back and forth more like a timing gear than an organic entity. But it was unmistakable, and very obviously a copy
of the gesture I made all the time.
Cheeirilaq was regarding me with all its eyes, antennae trained on me like the ears of an attentive dog.
It placed a barb tip under the placket of my hardsuit and lifted gently. Not enough to tear the suit away, though I was sure that was within its capabilities. I realized how horrible the suit was when it touched me: decon was just sterilizing the ichor; it wasn’t removing it.
I stepped back, shaking my head inside the helmet.
“I know it’s bloody and disgusting, but it’s the only one I have. And what are my odds of finding another charged one under these circumstances?”
Cheeirilaq took a breath so deep that bright-colored lines appeared along the green length of its abdomen. It let the breath out again, the transparent oxygen tubes that enriched the atmospheric mix near its spiracles pulsing in time.
I had never seen Rilriltok sigh. Or maybe it was just less dramatic when it did so.
Cheeirilaq pulled its raptorial limb back, and unclipped something from the tool belt that also held its gravity nullifier. With its smaller manipulator arms, it held the object out to me.
Another hardsuit nucleus.
Oh.
I stripped out of my filthy suit even faster than I had slapped it on myself, stopping only to retrieve the auxiliary battery pack. It felt so good to get the thing off my feet I almost cheered.
The suit was so dirty it wouldn’t retract back into the actuator. And it was even grosser on the inside, though less gory. I floated above it and stabilized my weightless body against a grab rail.
Cheeirilaq pressed the hardsuit core to my chest. It was Judiciary issue, I noticed.
Not surprising. Consider the source.
It adhered. A moment before I triggered it, I looked at Cheeirilaq’s tool belt once more.
Wait a minute. Antigravity belt. Functionally, a gravity control belt. I also had one of those. It had been sealed inside my suit, along with my exo and my body.
I thought about how the grav stretchers maintained their distance and orientation from the deck. I thought about what an idiot I had been.
I took off the gravity control belt I was wearing, handed it to the Goodlaw, and triggered the hardsuit. It unfurled around me with a clatter that seemed enormously loud to ears used to hearing everything muted through a helmet.
It sealed me in, and I sighed.
Thank goodness you listened, Cheeirilaq said, and held my belt back out to me. I wound it around the suit, clipped it, and turned it on.
Effortlessly, the grav belt oriented me to the floor. I didn’t need the mag boots and the effort of pulling them free with every step. I just needed this tool right here.
“Oh, I’m an idiot,” I replied. “Of course, Judiciary translation is working.”
We’re trying to hack into the hospital system and reboot it. But Linden is still walled off, and all the back doors are her back doors. If I understand what our AIs are telling me.
“What the hell is going on?”
Terrorists, Cheeirilaq said.
I tried to look up the word. Senso still wasn’t working. “Is that a sophipathology?”
I believe you would term it an illness of thought, yes. Except… it is also a weapon of the oppressed and powerless. I believe the relevant term from human history would be… monkey-wrenching?
“This is the Synarche,” I said. “This is Core General. Who’s oppressed?”
But I thought maybe I had heard of monkey-wrenching. A form of civil protest of unfair labor practices: workers destroying machinery.
I made sure I had a channel open to Sally’s frequency, and said, “Sally. Has it occurred to you that this is really weird sabotage? I would expect a lot more people to be getting hurt if these were serious attempts to cause harm.”
Plenty of people are being harmed.
“Yes, I’m pretty intimately acquainted with that right now. But not as many as should be, if hurting people were the intent.”
I nudged my blood-soaked, sweat-soaked, abandoned suit with an armored toe. Actually, I was going to clean that thing up right now. I picked it up and turned toward the recycler.
Sally asked, Do you think we’re being… pranked?
I thought about the blood on the suit in my hands. And all the blood that had washed over it through the course of the dia. I checked the time. I’d been in Casualty for seventeen hours, patching people together enough so they could survive until we got full functionality back as a, you know, Void-damned down-Welling sun-forsaken unrebirthing hospital.
I shoved the filthy suit into the recycler hatch much harder than was strictly necessary.
I was still trying to get my temper under control when the Goodlaw buzzed. It seems to me, friend Dr. Jens, friend Shipmind, that once a prank results in amputations and deaths, it is no longer a prank, but a felony.
“That’s accurate,” I agreed. “What did you want me for so urgently, Goodlaw?”
Cheeirilaq made a very strange noise, like a hissing cat or a lock depressurizing. Specialist Jones. From the generation ship crew.
“Yes,” I said, turning toward the ladder that would bring us down to Cryo in the absence of the lifts.
It’s escaped.
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.
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