Элизабет Бир - Machine

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—hi lar ious—so we communicated mostly by them shoving the affected area under my nose, and me spraying a biologically appropriate sealant over the wound.