Элизабет Бир - Machine

This is probably for the best, as the spawn are both numerous and cannibalistic. On Rashaq, they’re left to fend for themselves until they molt out into that educable stage.

Swimming is not encouraged for tourists on Rashaq. Rashaqins, as responsible sentients, do their best to avoid reproducing elsewhere. It’s hard on the local ecosystem. Also on their colleagues, as the egg-laying sex generally eats the other during the reproductive interlude, unless they’re already extremely well-fed. I understand that in modern society, the—we’ll call them females, though it’s not entirely accurate—generally bloat themselves with food before intercourse or resort to technological intervention for fertilization. And the males—like Rilriltok—tend to feed everybody they meet.

When I was still Judiciary and visited Rashaq a couple of decans ago, they were in the midst of a natural child-rearing fad. There had been a lot of articles about how the egg-layer eating the progenitor was much healthier for the young and rendered them more competitive in the wild. As there are, demographically, significantly more of Rilriltok’s sex, competition for mates is pretty extreme, and a surprising-to-me number of males volunteered.

Things might have gotten even uglier than they did, but Core General and the Judiciary both sent crisis intervention teams, and eventually the fad blew over with only a few dozen casualties who hadn’t signed up to be eaten. We managed to catch all the perpetrators and remand them for rightminding.

Anyway, my interaction with the Core General medical team there was how I got interested in working here.

“You’ve identified me correctly,” I said. “We’re here to check on our patients.”

Well, the patients were mine and Rilriltok’s. They were Helen’s crew.

Close enough.

I stepped past Cheeirilaq toward the window, raising the arm on the far side of my body so Rilriltok could use it as a bridge to scuttle around to the front if it felt it necessary. My colleague seemed to be at the mercy of its freeze reflex, however.

Cheeirilaq kept a respectful distance, and I assumed if Rilriltok needed to leave it would let me know.

Beyond the windows, the familiar coffins lay side by side, raised on racks that brought them up to a convenient height for most species to work at. Doctors and technicians of several species moved calmly around them, reading instruments and peering at whatever lay behind open panel covers. All the coffins we had brought back appeared to be here, and appeared to be intact.

Helen’s relief was palpable even before she said, “None of the systems have failed.”

It was still too early to be certain of that, but it seemed like a terrible time to point it out, so I didn’t.

RILRILTOK’S WEIGHT SHIFTED AS IT raised its eyes to peer over my shoulder. I turned slightly to give it a better view and more cover behind my torso.

Helen walked up to the glass and pressed both hands and what passed for her face against it. The body parts she pushed against the glass squished and flattened.

I guessed that left it up to me to carry the conversation.

I said, “What brings you here, Goodlaw?”

And almost jumped out of my scrubs when Rilriltok stridulated instead. The vibrations of its speech shivered up my spine and left my teeth aching in the bones of my skull.

Huh, it said. Well, that’s peculiar.

“Peculiar?” I echoed, grateful that the vagaries of senso translation hadn’t choked up an ambiguous word such as “funny.”

Rilriltok didn’t answer. It swarmed up my shoulder and stood balanced against the intervening window, giving me an unusual view of its feathery feet-hooks splayed on the transparent wall and the smooth, interlocking plates that made up the underside of its abdominal carapace. Its instinctive camouflage failed, and excited rills of blue and orange ran along its body from head to tail.

Pardon me, friend doctor, the Goodlaw said, in very careful tones. I apologize for addressing you directly, and if you find the situation too stressful I will withdraw the question. But, if you will pardon my rudeness, what is it that you have observed?

The scientist on my shoulder didn’t even flinch away from the predator it had been petrified of moments before. It shook itself with an excited buzz and flipped its wings as if ordering its thoughts.

These cryo units are not all identical, it said. They look similar, but let me draw your attention to these impedance readouts.

It tapped the glass, bringing up a display that my senso translated into good old human symbols after a couple of annoying flickers. They would have meant nothing to me—I am not a cryo specialist—but they meant something to the ayatana of the engineer that I was wearing.

One of the pods was significantly more efficient than the others, and running at significantly safer tolerances.

“Can we go inside?”

Rilriltok turned its head to me with one of the sharp, unsettling gestures that used to make me jerk back in surprise, before I became accustomed to my friend. I don’t see why not .

Helen, who had been standing perfectly straight except that her face pressed against the glass, said, “What do you mean, they’re not all identical? Of course they’re identical. We made them all on the same plan—”

Linden, I said to Core General’s giant, quiet sentience. With almost limitless space and processing power, the wheelmind’s only job was to care for the well-being of everyone who lived within her hull. The hospital didn’t talk much, but she was always there. Abiding.

She didn’t really need a hint from me. I felt her moving to soothe Helen, to calm her anxious algorithms and tame her runaway emotion modules. Linden would also call Dr. Zhiruo, if needed.

The interrupt was a good thing, even though I felt bad that it was being used without Helen’s consent. But it was being used to keep her safe. Her, and her crew, and the staff of Core General.

Helen didn’t breathe. But the effect of Linden’s intervention on her was exactly as if she had taken one deep breath, centered herself, and settled. Rilriltok had already lifted off my shoulder, and was zooming toward the door. I followed it—not quite as swiftly as Helen did—and Cheeirilaq trooped gamely along behind us. We disinfected—we didn’t have to mask and glove up, because none of the coffins were open—asked the staff for permission to join them, and went inside.

The first thing I noticed now that there wasn’t a helmet between me and the coffins—well, and now that they weren’t in vacuum in a cargo hold—was that the cryo units had a smell. A particular tang, like ozone or something. Watching Rilriltok’s feathery olfactors wave, I got a sense that I wasn’t the only one smelling it.

Rilriltok hovered up to its closest colleague—a gigantic Thunderby with three trunklike legs that stepped around the smaller medicos like a large human picking their way among cats—and said, Tell me about the differences in the units.

The specialist—a Dr. Tralgar, from its fox signature—waved a brick-red, tentacular appendage in an untranslatable gesture and said, Well, one of these is much better designed than the others. And there’s something odd about the cranial scan on the person inside.

“None of these people should have foxes, right?” I asked.

None of these people do have foxes, Dr. Tralgar trumpeted softly. At least, I assumed it was trying to keep its voice down, as I was only lightly deafened. The bugling and subsonics made an unpleasant counterpoint to the lingering buzz from Rilriltok’s stridulations. But this one has intracranial scarring.