Элизабет Бир - Machine

I stared at her. There were words in my head, but they all seemed to get jammed in the pre-verbial door trying to get out at the same time. She’d only been our pilot for a few standard months, but I’d come to rely on her skill and calm. And the nervous twitchiness I was picking up from her was… deeply worrying.

Loese, watching my expression, shrugged. “If Rhym hadn’t sensed smoke… well, their tendrils are a lot more sensitive than a human olfactory system. We could have been in much more trouble by the time we were found.”

But how could she be sure that none of us were behind it?

“This was sabotage.” I had to hear it in my own voice to internalize it, I suppose.

“Yes,” Loese said. “I am confident in that assessment.”

“But how could Sally not notice? How could she not detect the damage before it happened? How could she not feel the device?”

“That troubles me as well; thus my theory of the logic bomb. Sally is running a self-diagnostic, and we’ve been unable to find signs of any other time bombs ticking away, but a definitive cyberpathology report will probably have to wait until we get home again.”

“Should we abort? Run for home?” I asked.

Her lips pressed together. “We’re not in any more danger here than we are running home, really. We can do the diagnostics perfectly well right where we are. Our patients need us. And if something were to go catastrophically wrong, the next wave of rescue vehicles has a better chance of finding us here than they do somewhere in white space. I also wonder what the purpose of it was. It wasn’t enough damage to really endanger Sally. It just left us out of contact with you for a while.”

“Tsosie and I have been replaced by predatory, shapeshifting aliens,” I said. “You caught us. If you throw water on us, we’ll melt.”

I must have nailed the deadpan, because Loese blinked at me for at least three seconds before she laughed.

I said, “Even if Sally were totally disabled, or Tsosie and I got stuck on the generation ship, there’s a small fleet right behind us.”

“I know.” Loese shook her head. “The good news is, none of this is critical to life support or propulsion. And we’re looking for it, should anything happen again. When we get back, maybe the master chief will have some ideas about what happened.”

Master Chief O’Mara wasn’t in the Judiciary anymore, but everybody mostly still used their old title and not their new one. Core General’s ox dockmaster—really, they were the head of the Emergency Department, ox sector—was an old acquaintance of mine from the military. They were also a total badass.

I was kind of looking forward to the detonation when I told them somebody had busted one of the ships in their care. They would take it personally, and they treated invective as an art form.

I could look forward to a colorful performance.

“Can you run down whatever’s blocked Sally’s awareness of the event? I… what are the odds that that’s evidence of… that worm, or something that’s still messing with her functionality?”

“Working on it.” Loese waved me out of the cubby and sealed the hatch. “Really, really working on it. Now go do your job.”

Unsettled, I went to get a nice warm mug of creatine, anti-inflammatories, and caffeine from the gallery for breakfast. I sat down across from Tsosie, who was spooning porridge. He grunted a hello; I slurped my beverage. It was faintly lemon-flavored and a little spicy from the capsaicin and curcumin it contained. I hurt a little less than I had before I rested, and this would improve things even more.

“Loese tell you about the… damage?” I asked.

He nodded, lips flexing. He wasn’t what you’d call a handsome man, I didn’t think—though what did I know about what made men handsome? His cheekbones were wide over a sharply triangular chin, and his deep-set eyes seemed to rest behind them like caves on stark ledges. That gaze held a sharp intelligence, and it assessed me. “You worried about it?”

I slurped again. “A little, yeah.” That was an understatement. But hysteria is contagious, and even if you’re scared, you do the job in front of you, and then the next job after that. And you trust the other professionals around you to do their jobs, too.

That’s how you get through dangerous situations. That’s how we were going to get through this one. Sally’s injury—the sabotage—was her problem, and Loese’s, to deal with and repair. My fluttering at them wouldn’t help the situation, so I would do my own job and stay out of their way.

Maybe I should admit to Tsosie that I did, after all, have a little faith.

Tsosie pushed his bowl away and reached for his own mug, which smelled like chocolate. “You never get scared. You weren’t even scared back on the generation ship, walking out into that cargo hold with the machine following you like a pissed-off guard bot.”

“What was there to get scared of? There’s just a job to do.” I wrapped my hands around the mug. The heat helped the ache.

“Oh,” he said, “fembots. A ship that’s taking itself apart to become macro-programmable matter. Mysterious, sourceless sabotage damage to our own vessel. The incapacitated, silent Synarche ship you’re about to go enter?”

I held a hand out, flat, and wobbled it from side to side. So-so. “What else you got?”

He laughed at my ironic bravado and batted my hand aside. Gently, because Tsosie is always gentle. “You’re that dedicated to Judiciary.”

“I couldn’t care less about Judiciary. I left Judiciary when I got the chance to be a doctor full-time.” The drink was starting to taste metallic as it cooled. I swilled the rest of it. “I’m that dedicated to saving lives.”

“Sure, you’re an angel.” He shook his head and laughed harder: my expression must have been something to behold. “No, I know you are. This job is your life.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m not scared,” I said. “Maybe it’s that the job is all I have to lose.”

Tsosie stopped laughing.

“What?” I said.

He frowned at me, inspecting my face as intently as Loese had inspected the scorched bulkhead.

“What?” I said again.

“I believe you’re telling the truth.” He finished his chocolate and stood, sweeping his utensils together. “I hope you find more again, somedia.”

HAVING FINISHED HER DRONE RECONNAISSANCE of the docked ship, Sally called a shipwide meeting. It wasn’t hard, since there were just the six of us—Sally, me, Tsosie, Camphvis, Rhym, Hhayazh. And Helen, if you counted Helen. And a chip off the machine, and the frozen crew members from Big Rock Candy Mountain .

Those last weren’t included in the meeting, though. None of them got a vote. Neither was Helen, technically, but the only way to keep her from hearing us on a ship that small would have been to hold the meeting entirely in senso while trying to keep our faces straight.

Well, we could have sent her out an airlock and strapped her to the hull. But that sounded like an even more terrible idea, and somewhere in my oath of service there’s a line about “compassionate.”

When we were all floating comfortably, each armed with bulbs of whatever our species considered appropriate refreshment—except for Rhym, whose species did not engage in recreational eating—Sally said, “As we know, it’s a methane ship—”

“That’s what’s driving me down the Well. Why would they even dock? What would they hope to accomplish?” Tsosie’s voice trailed off as he contemplated the improbability of it all.

“I believe I agree with the sentiment my esteemed colleague is expressing,” Rhym said politely, when the silence had stretched for a while. “Why would a crew with utterly incompatible environmental needs go to all the trouble to couple to a ship that doesn’t even have standard airlock design?”