Machine

CHAPTER 18

DESPITE MY EXHAUSTION, I DIDN’T sleep particularly well. The pain kept waking me, even when I tuned it back. And I had to be up and fed and garbed and suited early.

I was attending grand rounds in a set of hydrogen atmosphere units that dia, as part of my continuing cross-species medical and cultural education, as required for all Core General staff. This was always… interesting, not least because their atmosphere and mine made a flammable combination.

Todia, it was even more of an annoyance than normal, because five shifts later, the lifts still weren’t working. And because the lifts still weren’t working, anybody who wanted to move around the hospital had to do it by climbing in and out of enviro suits at every section lock, or by sticking to the sections they could get through in a sterile softsider. So the lockers were a mess, and no one could rely on the lockers containing the equipment they were labeled as holding, because tracking and redistribution was falling behind demand.

You can only rightmind people into social consciousness so far when they’re running to make it to surgery. At least the lockers self-sterilized.

I still had my sterile suit from the previous dia, having almost fallen asleep in it. And it was designed so you could swap other environmental modules in on top of it—including the spark-proof, antistatic ceramic plates I needed for the hydrogen environment. So, a little chafing (for me) and a trip through the sterilizer (for the rig) aside, everything was under control. Even the hydrogen.

I finished that obligation by lunchtime.

I scarfed down another much-needed meal and scrambled back to Cryo, barely in time to introduce our second archaic human to her first alien. Tralgar told me they’d probably have Oni awake within the week, so that was one more task on my plate unless Loese could make herself available. She had better make herself available. Or I was going to have to turn into twins.

Nobody had asked Tsosie—or even suggested Tsosie as an alternate. Apparently, nobody thought much of his bedside manner.

I guess being overbooked is a compliment. But I was going to need a nap in the on-call room, because getting to my own quarters… well, they were far away. And I needed to get on with the task that O’Mara and the tree had assigned me.

And I needed to check on Helen, and make sure somebody somewhere was keeping tabs on the machine in Zhiruo’s and Linden’s absence. Not to mention find the time to talk to Sally some more about her own experience with sabotage.

There were not enough standards in the dia.

I wondered if I had enough time to find Rhym and ask them for a squat, tentacular hug. And maybe a neck massage. Those flexible sucker paddles on the ends of their gross manipulators are surprisingly excellent for getting right up into the attachment points at the base of the skull that are so poorly designed on us humans. And they squeeze really comfortingly.

When I let myself into Jones’s room this time, I was struck by how cramped it was in comparison to the rooms in the private unit. There was just about enough space in here for a Thunderby to edge around the bed if it was excruciatingly careful.

Jones seemed alert and oriented. She remembered me at once. “Hello, Dr. Jens.”

“Hello, Patient Jones,” I replied. The consonance of our family names pleased and amused me.

Based on her laugh, she hadn’t realized it before, and it amused her, too. “Do you think we’re related?”

I thought about the poetry that somebody had engineered into her DNA.

“It’s possible,” I said. “You’d have to ask an archinformist about the vowel shifts.”

She had solid food on her tray, I noticed approvingly. She seemed to have made a pretty good accounting of it, too, before she pushed it aside.

“How’s the grub?” I asked.

“A little weird,” she admitted. “Scrambled tofu is pretty much scrambled tofu, though.”

“Some of the options are worse than others, but I’m afraid it’s all hospital food.”

“All right, Doc.” She folded her arms and cocked her head suspiciously. Tubes draped with her movements. She was still being hydrated and electrolyte balanced. “I can tell from the look on your face that you’re up to something. And it’s not just checking up on patients, is it?”

“No… oo.” I looked over my shoulder. Cheeirilaq was out of sight along the wall. “Did you look over the files I left you?”

“About the Synarche? Sure.”

“Would you like to meet your first syster?”

Her eyes widened. “Already? I mean, there’s one here?”

“There’s a lot here. Your care team is minority Terran. Once you were awake, though, we didn’t want to shock you before you had some time to prep yourself.”

“Your multispecies culture is diverse and honors complexity,” she said, parroting one of the files I’d given her. “Mine only has boring human people in it.”

I laughed. Both of these archaic humans were so charming. Whatever brain damage Jones had suffered, Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo’s intervention seemed to have helped her heal without evident deficits other than the memory loss. It made me feel even more awful about the people we wouldn’t be able to save. And the ones we hadn’t been able to save already.

“I’ve seen the movies,” Jones continued. “If you’re not going to use me as an incubator for some horrible insectoid’s eggs, I can probably manage without freaking out.”

Hmm. Goodlaw Cheeirilaq definitely counted as a horrible insectoid, from an atavistic primate point of view. Maybe I should go get Tralgar. Or even Rhym or Hhayazh, though Hhayazh probably wouldn’t be any less horrifying, and its reproductive cycle did involve parasitism. Though not of sentient beings, in this dia and age.

Camphvis would probably do it if I asked nicely enough, but—eyestalks aside—I’m not sure a Banititlan really would be perceived as exotic enough.

The Goodlaw really did want to interrogate all of the surviving patients. I hadn’t seen anything to indicate that it would not do so nicely. But it didn’t hurt for me to keep an eye on the process, and my patients.

My secondhand patients. Patients once-removed?

“Well, in at the deep end,” I said. “Specialist Jones, this is Goodlaw Cheeirilaq. Cheeirilaq, come on in.”

The Goodlaw’s exoskeleton clicked gently as it lowered itself to duck through the doorway. It kept its raptorial arms and manipulators folded, and its wings furled tight under the wing coverts. Nothing, however, could make it look small.

Jones made a noise. I hadn’t taken my attention off her. Her heart rate spiked, though not as sharply as Carlos’s had. Eyes wide, shoulders pulled back against the pillows.

“I was kidding about the horrifying giant insects,” she said.

I solemnly vow not to parasitize you, Cheeirilaq responded. With its small manipulators, it popped the collar of its uniform jacket.

Its “voice” came from the bedside monitor, and Jones turned her shocked look at that. “It talks?”

“It’s sentient and sapient,” I said. “And very law-abiding.”

“Damn,” said Jones. “How many different kinds of… of systers are there?”

She had been studying.

“Thousands,” I said. “It’s a big galaxy. Not all of them are equally distributed. Any more than we are. Space travel is harder for some systers than others, depending on their environmental and emotional needs.”

“And not all of them are like that? Like you, Goodlaw? I’m sorry.”

She didn’t attempt Cheeirilaq’s name, and I didn’t blame her. It’s kind of a trill followed by a click, and human vocal apparatus can approximate it, but not without long practice. Mostly, we all rely on the translators.

No, not all of the systers are like me. Some are squishy, like you.

Jones shrugged. “If I’m squishy, I guess I need a harder shell.”

Your species is a syster species to mine. You are fine the way you evolved.

“Oh,” Jones said. “Oh! You mean that all of us are systers to one another!”

This is so, said Cheeirilaq. Cautiously, it elevated its body to a more natural position. Jones watched curiously, but to her credit did not recoil.

Admittedly, it was a giant bug—but it was also a giant bug in a tiny bolero jacket.

May I ask you some questions? it said.

I left Cheeirilaq interviewing the patient, once I’d satisfied myself that they were going to get along fine. I was hungry again, but the hospital was instituting rationing in order to weather the quarantine, and it was my shift to forgo eating.

Occasional fasting is good for my species, I told myself, and decided I could combine my initial research on the sabotage with my nap.

Multitasking always leads to excellent rest, as you know.

I took myself into an on-call room—currently empty—and claimed a bench bed. It was a little too short and wide for my species, but I made do, constructed a nest, plugged in my exo, and started scrolling through the incident reports of recent accidents at the hospital. I should probably look at the sites in person… but the lifts weren’t running, and who had the time?

O’Mara was right. I immediately identified a significant statistical upswing in “safety incidents” over the past half an or so. No surprise there, obviously, but it’s good to have confirmation. Human brains are excellent pattern makers. They’ll figure out a pattern even if all you’ve got are random data points that don’t actually mean anything, which is why we also have AIs and statisticians.

And AI statisticians, who are kind of terrifying.

There had been a chlorine leak into a water section—bad, but no fatalities—and another into an oxygen section that had been detected and contained before reaching dangerous levels. There’d been a malfunction in the newly installed artificial gravity that had buckled deck plates in an ox section and dropped atmospheric pressure enough so the decomp doors had triggered on either side. Nobody had been standing in the doorways, but the engineer handling the testing had spent an uncomfortable standard hour and a half pinned to the floor by high gravity and isolated by dropped doors.

Fortunately, he was from a fairly sturdy species and had suffered no lasting injuries.

Another staffer—a Terran—had not been so lucky, and had sustained near-fatal burns when a pressure seal in the airlock into one of the hell-planet sections that made Venus seem balmy had failed after she’d stripped out of her pressure suit—a rattling armored vehicle on treads. She’d still had her softsuit on, and that had probably saved her life. She was receiving clone grafts, some of it neural tissue.

I flinched in sympathy.

Those armored self-mobile hardsuits were designed to endure conditions beyond even what my rescue hardsuit could be adapted to. The idea of sweating up a swamp in one, caring for patients, struggling out of the foul thing only to be caught in a jet of superheated steam and half cooked alive… it was something I could relate to far too personally.

There were other incidents of equipment failure or safety protocol malfunction, an additional half dozen or so. One more had led to a serious injury. Another had resulted in a pair of fatalities.

If it was all sabotage, it couldn’t all be caused by the same person—could it? It was happening in too many different sectors, on too many different shifts. And then there was the incident on Sally, with the damaged coms. We all assumed it had been set up before we left port. But what if Sally had been damaged by a member of the crew, and she and Loese were in denial about it?

That was horrifying.

Why had O’Mara and the Administree recruited me for this job? They had access to staff logs, to the comings and goings of everybody in the hospital. They could access all sorts of information that was off-limits for a simple trauma doc.

You might even say that Starlight was the central Authoritree.

For ox and CO₂, anyway.

No, the quality of my sense of humor is not improved by stress.

But couldn’t they check who had accessed each damaged sector before the damage occurred? Well, maybe. The Synarche’s privacy regulations precluded pulling bulk data, though I was confident we could get a warrant to track the movements of an individual person or persons if I could identify a suspect or two. Assuming that they hadn’t used timed devices to cause the damage, which they probably had, which in turn meant that establishing a timeline would be well-nigh impossible when one considered the sheer volume of traffic around this place.

Yes, I know, privacy is a core value and a sentient right. But right then it was a pain in my ass.

So what did my supervisors think I could do—or that I would notice—that they couldn’t?

Well, O’Mara and I had known each other for a long time. They trusted me. They knew I had a Judiciary background.

Tsosie and I had been the people most threatened by the sabotage on Sally, so perhaps O’Mara assumed that I was unlikely to be behind it. Also, I’d been away from the hospital when most of the local incidents took place.

So I was likely to be clean, from their perspective. Okay.

I wasn’t an investigator or an archinformist, but I had some investigative skills. Cheeirilaq, for example, was immediately identifiable as law enforcement, and was treated as such. Law enforcement, and also a gigantic predator.

I was little and squishy—as I had recently been reminded—and wore medical symbols, not Judiciary rank.

So I was nonthreatening, and I had a reason to be most anyplace in the hospital….

Huh. With the exception of the chlorine bleed into water, all of the sabotage events had taken place in ox sections. Now that was interesting. It suggested that the culprit or culprits were oxygen or CO₂ metabolizers, who might access those areas without checking out suits and leaving a trail.

And perhaps it was revealing for other reasons than the suit issue. Because one thing about giant multi-environment stations—whether they are hospitals or hab wheels or something else—is that people who live and work exclusively in one environment can forget that the others exist. This tendency is even more prevalent in new arrivals from single-environment habs.

Or planets.

So maybe I was looking for somebody who hadn’t been here for very long. And whose background was somewhere deep in an oxygen-only settlement. That would explain both why the events had started up recently, and why they were largely limited to ox environments. And water. A person from an oxygen planet would remember about water.

It was also possible that the sabotage was entirely limited to ox environments, if it turned out that the outlier was a legitimate accident. It’s too easy to get bogged down in trying to fit all the available events into an identified pattern—in creating conspiracy theories—whether or not all those events actually belong together. In any case, I scribbled a physical note to O’Mara, DNA sealed it, put it in an interdepartmental folder marked CONFIDENTIAL, and sent it off down the hall by mail robot.

At least checking up on ox-sector staffers from ox-only environments who had joined the hospital in the last an was a starting point.

I woke from a light doze with a start. My limbs still ached with exhaustion; my fox told me I’d only drifted off for twenty minutes or so. What had awakened me was not a sound or motion, but the sudden crystallization of an idea.

I had been thinking that the saboteur or saboteurs might be unsophisticated in how they thought about multi-environment habs, and in that case probably newcomers to Core General. But what if the opposite was true?

I’d considered the possibility that it was somebody savvy enough to know that checking out softsuits to go into hostile environments might eventually lead to them getting caught. But what if the saboteur (or saboteurs) was—were—from a non-ox-compatible environment, and they were committing their crimes in ox sectors as a red herring? That was a better scenario for me, because it might mean that they had outsmarted themselves.

In either case, how were they hiding from Linden? The same way whoever had sabotaged Sally was hiding from Sally?

I tuned myself a little wider awake and sent another note to Starlight and O’Mara suggesting that they look into suit checkouts into ox sectors as well as out of them, though I imagined they’d thought of it already.

That’s why we have checklists. Because all too often, everybody assumes that everybody else has thought of it already. And then important, lifesaving steps somehow fail to be taken.

And then accidents happen and people like me show up to—in the best-case scenario—drag you out of the rubble and graft and glue you back together and dust off your shoulders and say, “You oughtn’t have been so careless.”

AIs usually follow checklists. AIs might get bored, but they don’t get lazy and they don’t cut corners. This is why ships have shipminds and habs have wheelminds.

Because organic-type slowbrains get lazy and bored, and discipline is not always our strong suit.

What if the saboteur was an AI? That would give it a route to prevent itself from being noticed, and perhaps even to hack the memories of other AIs, like Linden and Sally. I’d seen Sally’s telepresence—at least enough to speak to me—without triggering the AI presence lights.

Hm. Possible.

I must have dozed off again despite supporting my brain chemistry, because this time I woke about a standard and a half later with my reader resting on my nose. I nearly rolled on my side and went back to sleep.

But… speaking of following the checklists, I pushed through the achy sluggishness of exhaustion, stowed my reader, and pulled the net down over the bed. I willed the lights off. Feeling smug in my self-righteousness and a little ridiculous also, I closed my eyes.

I assume I must have, anyway, because I don’t remember falling asleep. The next thing to impinge on my consciousness was a tremendous, reverberating crash. The bed net snapped tight against me as I bounced hard, imprinting my skin with what would no doubt be some very interesting contusions. Then, abruptly, I was floating.

Well, I was held firmly against the mattress, but when you’ve worked in space as long as I have, it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between being pressed to the bed by acceleration, and being pressed to the bed by the net.

Speaking of checklists, this was a great time for one.

I had air for now. That was the first thing.

The second thing was visibility, and I had no light. The on-call room was very dark. Darker than it should have been, because I’d turned the lights off but there’s always a readout by the door that doubles as a night light. I lay there in that dark and listened with everything in me for the hiss of escaping atmosphere. Or, worse, a total absence of sound from outside that would tell me the corridor beyond my little single-thickness door had been decompressed and evacuated.

Vibrations made themselves felt through the bulkhead. The structure of the hospital creaked violently. The hab wheel had stopped spinning, which was why my gravity had failed, and the hospital’s hull was complaining at the strain. I imagined Starlight with tendrils dug deep in the hull, holding us together more or less bare-rooted.

That was a little bit of melodrama.

The hospital’s superstructure wouldn’t fail. The most vulnerable staff and patients had the new gravity belts, so there was a good chance nobody’s physiology was killing them while I lay there sorting myself out. But lots of bad things happen when gravity unexpectedly fails, as you can probably imagine.

I might have heard voices carrying through the door. People moving. I was listening so hard for reassuring sounds I might have been imagining them.

Sally?

No answer didn’t mean she wasn’t out there. It meant that the hospital system wasn’t relaying my senso uplink to her and that she couldn’t reach me through the hull.

If I got out of bed I might be slammed against a wall or deck when the hab started rotating again. The safest thing to do was to stay right where I was, buckled in and tucked away, and wait for an all-clear.

But my job was saving lives in emergency situations, and this was, in my professional estimation, exactly that.

I took a deep breath, reached out, unplugged my exo—which wasn’t getting a charge from the trickler anyway, with the power off—and snapped the net back out of the way. The bed cubby had handles, and I used them to pull myself out into the on-call room and try to orient. The bed was down: that was where the floor would be if—when—spin reasserted itself. Therefore, I should keep my shock-absorbing bits pointed in that direction.

I floated toward the door. Where I guessed the door was, anyway. There was no orange light next to it, indicating vacuum or a noncompatible atmosphere on the other side. But there was no blue light, either. (Red and green are traditional for Terrans, but in a big hab like Core General, not everybody can see the wavelengths that produce red light—and orange and blue are far apart on the spectrum.)

Well, if I was lucky, then the safety interlocks wouldn’t allow me to open the door if there was nothing but space and slowly freezing bodies outside.

I didn’t feel lucky.

There was a suit locker outside the on-call door, where I had left my softsider. If there was vacuum on the other side, my blood would begin to release oxygen almost immediately, whether I held my breath or not. Once the deoxygenated blood reached my brain, I would immediately black out.

I would have about fifteen seconds to get some pressure into my lungs before I fainted. I’d be dead within a minute or two after that.

So my first priority was oxygen, and the second was to get myself back into my softsuit. Or a hardsuit, if there was one in the locker. That would actually be easier, because I’d only have to slap the activator on my chest and go. I’d probably lose consciousness before it sealed itself, but if I was lucky I’d wake right back up again without too much brain damage.

Back in the Judiciary, we used to drill on suiting up. My personal best with a softsuit was seventeen point one five seconds. That gave me maybe ten seconds—conservatively—to get to the locker, get it open, and get a helmet on. Possibly in pitch blackness, with the tears boiling off my eyeballs and my capillaries popping.

Piece of cake.

They could graft me new eyeballs. Assuming there was a hospital left afterward.

There was even a handle beside the door that I could cling to, in case of explosive decompression. I grabbed a few deep breaths and oxygenated. I didn’t know if it would help, but it might buy me an extra second or two.

All this assumed that the door would unlock and snap open for me, the way it was designed to. If I had to crank it open manually and there was vacuum on the other side, I’d suffocate before I made a big-enough gap to squeeze through. In that case, I would be stuck waiting here for rescue—without the telltales, it was too much risk.

I hit the emergency door override, praying it would work without any faith in my prayers being heard. Or answered. I did not feel lucky.

Fun fact: feeling lucky has nothing at all to do with whether you are or are not lucky.

There was air on the other side of the door, though still no light. Down the corridor, I could clearly hear sounds now: voices, a metallic thumping, the sound of a softsuit proximity beeper warning anyone nearby that it existed. I bobbed softly in the draft as the pressure equalized. Then, using the grab rail (oh grab rails, that I ever maligned you!) and the rough wall surface, I pulled myself along the bulkhead to the suit locker.

There was a telltale on the locker door, and it was blue. I opened it, located a hardsuit activator, and slapped it in place, timing myself in my head.

Twenty seconds. I was out of practice, and the suit was a slightly unfamiliar model. Core General goes through a lot of suits, and they’re replaced on a rolling basis. This one was so new the lining still smelled faintly of carcinogens.

For now, I left the faceplate unsealed. I wanted to save the suit oxygen in case, later on, I really needed it. It would seal itself if the pressure dropped. But now I had the boosters in the suit electronics. And that meant I might be able to get ahold of—

Oh, I am so grateful, Llyn. There you are! I was terrified. Are you safe? Where are you?

I breathed out, light-headed with relief, and gave her access to my tracking and senso. “I found a hardsuit. What’s going on, Sally?”

I don’t know. I can only presume it’s more sabotage. Power is marginal. Translator systems are down. I’m okay, I think. I’ve been isolating my own systems since Linden and Dr. Zhiruo got sick. Can you make it to my berth? EVA might be safest.

I finally found the toggle, and turned my suit lights on. Dim, to save battery and avoid blinding anybody whose eyes might be pointed at me.

“I can’t,” I said, when I got a look down the corridor. “I have to be a doctor now.”

It was disaster triage, except the victims were sometimes people I knew, and nearly all of them were extremely hard to talk to without translation protocols. Which also didn’t exist for the time being.

If they were incapacitated, I did what I could to stabilize them and moved on. Fine repairs could wait for later. If they weren’t incapacitated, they were eager to get a bandage slapped on and to get back to work as soon as the synthskin or their metabolic equivalent started working.

I had to pass by Records on my way, and—with the help of my datapad and some bad machine translation—got them to upload a few ayatanas into my fox. Ox breathers of various anatomies; every little bit of information would help. Even if I had the wrong ayatana for a particular species, convergent evolution and biological convenience were still useful.

I walked out with my feet squishing strangely and my body shambling oddly. Well, we’d get used to each other. And I was definitely going to need their medical knowledge before the dia was out.

Most of the injuries to staff were relatively minor ones, which was good because I didn’t have ayatanas for every person who’d banged their head—or whatever the topmost part of their body was—against the ceiling when the spin gravity cut out. And without coms, I couldn’t call a doctor or nurse of an appropriate species for backup.

They were probably all busy in their own sections, dealing with human patients whose contusions and gashes and fractures would be quite as much a mystery. I couldn’t even ask my own patients what was wrong except by typing and machine translating on a datapad—hilarious—so we communicated mostly by them shoving the affected area under my nose, and me spraying a biologically appropriate sealant over the wound.

I made my way back to Casualty, stopping to help injured people along the way. I left the patients still in rooms alone unless there was a crisis: they were as safe where they were as they could be anywhere, and their own care teams would have the relevant ayatanas.

And the hospital staff, once the initial confusion settled, started pulling together and cooperating with surprising efficiency. We couldn’t communicate complicated concepts, but we knew our jobs. And with long practice, you get a sense of when somebody is going to ask for a hemostat.

Casualty—the Emergency Department—had been nearly vacant and understaffed since the quarantine went into effect, because there was nobody coming in. Now it was a mob scene. And a mob scene under emergency lighting—at least the emergency lighting was working, here—in zero g, with people clinging to the deck with mag boots (like me) or zipping around, their trajectories narrowly avoiding collisions with one another, or occasionally not avoiding those collisions at all. I ducked under a cloud of drifting feathers from one such incident and made my way toward the admin desk, looking for somebody to tell me where I could be most useful.

My exo was at seventy percent, and I was sore but not in terrible pain. It wouldn’t have mattered if I was, under the current circumstances.

A team of three guiding one of the new grav stretchers sailed in alongside me. They were all suited, using their jets to navigate and push. The stretcher’s grav technology maintained its attitude with respect to the deck despite the lack of rotational acceleration. I was impressed. I hadn’t known they did that.

One of the medics pushing the stretcher noticed me standing there and squeaked demandingly through nasal slits. I jumped out of the way. It hissed like a deflating balloon and wrapped a suit-clad tentacle with a spatulate, arrowlike end around my wrist, tugging more or less gently.

It squeaked again.

The patient needs assistance, Sally said.

I glanced down at myself. My suit was covered in Well knows what, and nothing about my person was scrubbed and sterile. But it had picked up my identification codes from my fox, and there on my breast was my name in several sets of symbols—and my specialty.

Trauma doctor.

I stepped up to the stretcher and leaned in.

It was bad.

I wasn’t sure what species the patient was, but they bled the same hemoglobin pigment as me. I assumed that the rattling swell and release of atmosphere through spiracles into the tube-like body was desperate respiration: blood loss or pain. Two of the medics were applying manual pressure to savage-looking wounds. I didn’t need an ayatana to know the patient was bleeding to death.

I might need that ayatana to stop it from happening.

The patient made noises and gestures of dismay and distress that I didn’t need a translator to understand. They were probably feeling exactly as I would have felt, had our positions been reversed. They looked to have lost several pieces of their body: part of a locomotion limb, and an upper-body manipulator. The edges had the ragged look of an industrial accident, not the neat severing of a decomp door. The patient was wearing a maintenance uniform, and I imagined it must have been operating a piece of heavy equipment when the gravity went off. A floor-polisher or loader or something worse.

I couldn’t even request a surgical room. By the time I made myself understood, the patient would have bled to death.

I wanted to stick this patient in a cryo tank and wait for a specialist. I didn’t even know what meds I could give it for pain without killing it. I—

It was as if I weren’t in the hospital at all, but on a rescue mission outside somewhere, unable to communicate well and with only my own crew for support.

Wait.

Wait! Sally! Can you tell me what this syster is, and what I can give it for pain and shock? Does it do shock? And can you reach its fox and tune the pain down? The automatic response doesn’t seem to be working.

She read me a list of medications and a synthetic transfusion base as we were guiding the patient into a treatment bay. Then my next problem became finding a way to communicate those requirements to the pharmacy. I had handed back all the datapads I’d borrowed along the way… but I still had the reader I’d stowed in my thigh pocket. It was inside the suit, but I wiggled it out, inputted Sally’s list, and handed it to the syster with the lowest rank insignia—which was not the one with the tentacles.

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.