Элизабет Бир - Machine

Before you ask, Sally said, no, I don’t have coms with that machine.

We’ve been working together too long. Does the vehicle use an obsolete protocol? In theory, communications protocols used by systers when building their kit were supposed to be cross-compatible. In theory.

Ships and stations managed to talk to each other pretty well. But I would need as many appendages as a Rashaqin to count the number of times we’d dragged some poor sentient back to Core General in part because their space suit had stopped talking to other space suits, and somebody had gotten hurt out there.

Negative. As far as I can determine, it doesn’t use any protocol. In fact, the whole thing is so EM- and radiation-shielded that the best sensor data we’re getting from it is lidar and magnetic resonance. So I can’t even find any indication that it has a personality simulator in there, let alone an AI core.

Well. That’s weird. Why would you get into a pod you couldn’t communicate in or out of?

If there was anything you could trust, it was the radiation shielding on a Darboof ship. A species that needed more protection from most of the EM spectrum would have a hard time evolving, because the background radiation of the cosmos and whatever radioactive rocks were baked into their homeworld was likely to kill them.

On the other hand, this machine could be a vehicle, designed so you could take it on any ship, and there were radiation eaters and other hot weirdies who left fissionable material scattered around.

I don’t think that walker is standard tech. Synarche tech, even, though it’s a big Synarche. There’s nothing like that aesthetic and design in my databases. So possibly it has perfectly fine coms. I can’t get a carrier. I’ve had no problem getting into Afar’s systems, though, as you can see.

Did you find Afar’s shipmind yet? I stared at the machine, and I had the eerie sensation that its glossy black eyespots stared back at me.

Maybe? I’m… honestly not certain. There are those iterating backups. And there is data. But he’s not…

He’s unresponsive, Rhym said. If he were an organic life-form I’d say he was down at the bottom of the coma scale for whatever species he happened to be.

In other words, we were at an impasse and I needed to break it. We could still tow the whole vessel back to Core General and let them sort it out—and I suspected we were going to wind up doing that—but safety precautions were part of my remit as well.

We could weld the craboid in place. But if it tears itself loose it’s a risk to Afar’s crew. We could jettison it, assuming we can get it to let go of the cargo hold, and tow it separately. It’s not that big. But it could operate on a remote signal, and if it suddenly turns aggressive in white space we’ll all have a huge problem.

Sally said, Yeah, I’m going to flag that one as unsafe practices. Even if we don’t exactly have a safety protocol in the docs for towing illegally parked armored walkers home.

Sally was so deadpan that I laughed harder than the joke warranted. Which meant that I sprayed saliva on the inside of my face mask. It was still opaqued, but the little spit globes did crazy refraction tricks against the heads-up graphics Sally was feeding me. Dammit.

“Kurukulla on a clamshell!”

Status? Tsosie and Sally asked at once. I didn’t usually blaspheme. It’s not nice to invoke other people’s deities.

I laughed. I just spit on my plate. It gives me an idea, though. What if we fill the cargo bay with foam?

With… foam?

Sure. I tapped my arm. It didn’t make any noise in the vacuum, but inside the suit I heard it. Rigid insulating foam. We fill the available space with it, and run a Faraday cage around the inside of the cargo bay so nobody can trigger the arachrab—the walker—from outside. We foam one of the drones in with it so we have immediate telemetry. If it wakes up, we’ll know.

Silence followed for a few moments. Rhym was the first to break it. Given our current resources and needs, I don’t see an immediate flaw in this plan. If the machine is totally quiescent, it might be overcautious…

But, said Camphvis, we can’t leave the patients here. And I’d rather be overcautious than torn apart by Hhayazh’s mechanical cousin.

Hey! Hhayazh said. That doesn’t look anything like me!

Fewer legs, said Tsosie . But it kind of does.

In descending order of priority, my jobs were to keep my crew safe, keep myself safe, and save as many lives as possible.

I didn’t feel unsafe. My crew weren’t at risk right now. Afar’s crew members were stable and getting some metabolic support now that I had that set up. They’d need additional care on the trip home, but that could be done while we were en route.

My senso link to my team told me everything was working out in terms of getting control of Afar and slaving his drives to our own, which meant we wouldn’t even have to risk a physical connection between the two ships. Always dicey, though salvage operators did it regularly. Tow truck drivers are a crazy lot of starfuckers, and as somebody who jumps out of perfectly good starships I feel like I’m qualified to comment: I have been involved in the retrieval and rescue operation on more than one salvage op gone bad in my time.

It would be embarrassing to have to be rescued ourselves. And of course my concern was all about professional pride.

As if she had been party to my thoughts, Sally said, We’re ready to start turning Afar. Please make sure you are braced for a change in vector and velocity, Llyn.

I braced against the handholds. Once the v is stable, would you foam up Tsosie and Hhayazh and send them over? I want to start treatment on the crew.

Absolutely. I’m checking to see if Afar has a way to talk to the… arachrab?

Walker thing?

Let’s stick with craboid, Loese said. What’s an arachrab, anyway?

She could have looked it up. But I guess she was flying the ship or something, so I told her. Or started to, anyway: Sally interrupted as I was getting to the part about the music.

Maneuver concluded.

I nudged myself away from the bulkhead and drifted back from the craboid. It didn’t move. I oriented to the same attitude and plane as (what I had arbitrarily decided was) the front of the walker. It did have an odd aesthetic. I couldn’t figure out if all those weird, rose-prick barbs were functional or decorative. Maybe if I knew what syster had built it, I would have a better idea what their function was. Or at least I would know who to ask.

Maybe whatever built this thing thought rose prickles were pretty.

Sally, can you get these cargo bay doors open?

Working, she answered. Also figuring out how to fab a few hundred thousand liters of packing foam, given the materials at hand.

Big air spaces? I suggested.

You’re very funny.

SINCE I HAD DECLARED AFAR safe for operations, Tsosie and Hhayazh suited up, insulated themselves, and crossed over to Afar to begin treating the patients while I was heading back to Sally to get warm, and cool, and basically regulate my body temperature and get a sandwich and a nap. Once they were safely aboard and setting up life support for the crew, Sally finished asserting her control of Afar’s systems.

While she worked, I wrote a letter to my daughter.