Элизабет Бир - Machine

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.